Sometimes, a book just doesn’t go as hard as you want it to. When I read the description for I Want to Burn This Place Down by Maris Kreizman, I thought, here’s someone who gets it, here’s someone who has been on the same journey I’ve been on for the past 10-15 years, of unlearning the lies we’re told as nice white girls in America. And to a certain degree, that’s what it is, but Kreizman is a little too caught up in her own experience to really reflect on the experience of others.
Like a lot of middle class white Americans in their 40s, Kreizman grew up believing that if you just followed the rules and did all the right things, you’d grow up, get a job with security and good healthcare, be able to afford a home, find The One, and live happily ever after. Instead, she graduated into a world of unpaid or underpaid internships, layoffs, expensive healthcare, a studio apartment, and the emotional minefield of dating.
This book is at the most interesting when it’s sharing Kreizman’s experience with developing Type 1 Diabetes as a child and struggling to manage the perilous relationship between her physical and mental health, and reflecting on how ridiculous it is that in order to be a freelance writer and afford her insulin, she has to be on her husband’s healthcare — in essence, that she can only pursue the career she loves and be healthy because she lucked into finding a man who had a good career with good healthcare.
It sucks for Kreizman that I find her writing the most compelling when she’s mining her own trauma.
For the rest of the book, Kreizman demonstrates immense privilege which she only occasionally acknowledges and looks beyond. Mostly, she acknowledges the big benefits of her privilege: the fact that she had parents who had good insurance, who could take time off work and to take her to numerous specialists when her diabetes proved complicated. She doesn’t acknowledge the privilege of having parents who were financially comfortable enough that after every specialist visit in NYC, they took her to a Broadway show. As someone who grew up feeling like a trip to the dollar theater for a second-run movie was a special treat, this was not even close to relatable.
A story about her parents renting a limo to pick her twin brothers up from school to go out for a special birthday dinner, where she was disgusted watching people eat lobster? Also not relatable.
Don’t even get me started on the essay about how a distant relation owned a popular high-end NYC department store, and how sad it was when it was eventually sold and dismantled.
There are moments throughout the book where she briefly touches on the struggles of people of color in the publishing industry, and the ridiculousness of basing these jobs in NYC but not paying a livable NYC wage; where she talks about people doing GoFundMe campaigns to pay for their insulin; where she talks about how copaganda tries to distract us from the realities of policing. But she never really digs deep into issues of race and class. Instead she focuses about how the system is so rigged that even she, an upper middle class cishet white lady who got a good education, had to marry for healthcare and has an apartment too small to ever raise kids in, if she even wanted them.
Kreizman strikes me as someone who could get more radicalized as she gets older. She might learn better how to use her own privilege as a tool to fight for others. She might talk directly to her two cop brothers about their increasingly right wing attitudes, rather than writing about her assumptions and fear of confronting them. She’s just not quite there yet. Hopefully, this book will reach the people who haven’t quite caught up to her yet, and get them started on their own journey, but for me, I was just left feeling like this was a little too self-centered and not quite deep enough.
CWs and TWs: In-depth discussion of physical and mental health, including health anxiety and COVID-19; discussions of policing and police violence.
Source and Format: I borrowed the audiobook from Timberland Regional Library.
Reading Challenge Prompts
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): Cheaper than Therapy. To be clear, Kreizman talks about being in therapy for her anxiety. But therapy is expensive, and you probably don’t want to spend that time just ranting. Sometimes it’s really cathartic to sit down and write those thoughts out, and Kreizman does put together a pretty well-crafted essay. Reading some of these will probably also be cathartic to people who have had similar experiences.
Reading Challenge Progress
Nook & Cranny (Card 1): 19 of 25, 3 bingos.
Nook & Cranny (Card 2): 24 of 25, 9 bingos.
Book Riot: 20 of 24.
Physical TBR: 11 of 12.
World of Whimm: 23 of 24, 8 bingos.