April 9, 2018
Poet Young (Magnificent Moon) makes her nonfiction debut with this collection of probing, if sometimes pretentious, essays about growing up and becoming an adult. Refreshingly, she acknowledges that her own coming-of-age was far from unique, and the best selections are those in which Young takes some critical distance from herself. Her voice is more confident and her sentences more pointed in these pieces, such as an investigation of Japanese hikikomoris’ hermit lifestyles in “Sea of Trees.” “Witches,” about discovering the taboo of nudity as a child and becoming trapped within the accompanying body self-consciousness, takes on more resonance placed next to “Bones,” about a young boy becoming trapped in his own body by a rare bone disorder. However, Young’s autobiographical essays can still fall into the trap of faux-profound navel-gazing: “I was ashamed of myself, now, for asking so insistently what I could do with stories I only half understood. I stopped writing about Big Red and all I wanted it to symbolize,” she writes about her brother’s favorite jacket. It’s clear Young believes that, as she writes about the hikikomori, “immersion is the desired state” for self-discovery, but Young seems to learn the most about herself, and find the most to teach her readers, when she can immerse herself in a state that isn’t her own.