Book Review: Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay

ISBN: 0062282719
Published: August 5th, 2014
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Received: purchased
Read from December 20th to 31st, 2016
Synopsis from Goodreads:

Pink is my favorite color. I used to say my favorite color was black to be cool, but it is pink—all shades of pink. If I have an accessory, it is probably pink. I read Vogue, and I’m not doing it ironically, though it might seem that way. I once live-tweeted the September issue.
In these funny and insightful essays, Roxane Gay takes us through the journey of her evolution as a woman of color while also taking readers on a ride through culture of the last few years and commenting on the state of feminism today. The portrait that emerges is not only one of an incredibly insightful woman continually growing to understand herself and our society, but also one of our culture.
Bad Feminist is a sharp, funny, and spot-on look at the ways in which the culture we consume becomes who we are, and an inspiring call-to-arms of all the ways we still need to do better.

Review:

Bad Feminist is one of the best books I had read in a while, and I knew going into it that it would be. Early last year I attended a reading that Roxane Gay did at Butler. There she read some of the essays from this collection, and I loved each of them that she chose to read with us then.

While there are some smaller points that Gay makes in the book that I would disagree with, she still manages to argue those points well. It feels strange to refer to a book such as this as "well-rounded", but that's the best term I can think of to describe how many different types of emotions Gay manages to hit. Parts of the book had me laughing out loud and others had me crying. I loved all of those parts equally.

I highly recommend Bad Feminist. It covers a lot of ground, and I love the central message that there's no way you're going to pull off being a 'perfect feminist' and that feminism itself can't be perfect, but that doesn't mean we dismiss feminism entirely because it's central message is important and worth fighting for.