2023 was the Year of the Woman-of-Color, With Three Powerfully Intimate Memoirs That Changed My Life
- In 2024, I hope more are written and shared, including, perhaps, yours. I hope you might join me in reading them, and in healing collectively together.
In 2023, many tried to bury the COVID-19 pandemic in their psyche, under thick layers of “It’s nice to see everything back to normal,” and “Now we’re back to the way things were.” But I do not come from a tradition of burial. I come from a tradition of cremation, in which our senses must confront the transformation of the dead—the process of dying seared into our memories, and the ashes scattered into water that flows back to us so that we are never the same and we can never return to what was.
Try as I did in 2023, I could not snap back to life before March 2020. Three years of pandemic living had changed me and I could not simply bury them. I could not pretend everything was back to normal when, as a South Asian American, Hindu woman, I was never perceived to be normal in white America in the first place.
For me, 2023 became a year of making sense of how my life had changed not only due to the pandemic but also due to our nation’s racial reckoning of June 2020—in the wake of the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. I believed, and still do, that there are important lessons to learn from it all. But, first, I had to make peace with how all of it had changed me. I had to start healing from a transformation that seemed largely outside of my control.
I initially felt that I was on this journey alone as speaking about any of it seemed taboo. It was impossible to tell who had buried the recent past and who was cremating it in the open, as I was.
I have slowly come to recognize that both are forms of healing. But unearthing the buried is a lot more work, and often solitary, as most do not want others to see what is exposed. I was reminded of this every time I posted about my struggles and my family’s struggles on social media—struggles with our mental and physical health deriving both directly and indirectly from COVID-19. I had exposed too much, several friends told me. They did not want to see it unless it was half-buried in pithy memes.
That Gupta, especially, was willing to expose her South Asian American family’s gradual and destructive unraveling at the hands of a society and culture that only cared about their success has been especially meaningful and inspiring, to me.
I tried to bury my pain in pithy, trending memes of wellness and self-care. I took getaway trips with my family. I got outside more. I subscribed to an online exercise program I got halfway through and then allowed to languish. I journaled. I took lots of deep, meditative breaths. I spent more time on my Calm app and less time on news media apps. I tried to limit my virtual meetings. In a word, I disconnected, because that’s what self-care prescribes.
All of it helped, but none of it was enough. I craved connection. I was drawn to sociology and Ethnic Studies, after all, because both reassured me that I am not alone in my experiences—that there is comfort to be found in the collective, even in shared struggles and pain. But nearly every time I asserted this need in our individualist culture and society, even to therapists and coaches, I was met with the tired metaphor of “You can’t pour from an empty cup!” I began to ask, “What if I can’t fill my cup on my own? Who will pour into my cup?” Silence.
Of course, the answer, all along, was other women of color who, like me, believe in collective healing more than self-care—who believe that we must fill, pour, and re-fill each other’s cups, whether simultaneously or sequentially, to thrive under circumstances and constraints largely outside of our control. Who believe in sharing, not burying, our pain.
In 2023, I finally learned the best way for me to connect with these other women of color and engage in collective healing with them — memoirs. To me, 2023 was the year of the woman-of-color memoir, with three powerfully intimate books that have changed my life for the better: Tricia Hersey’s “Rest is Resistance: A Manifesto (published in late 2022); Julia Lee’s “Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America (2023);” and Prachi Gupta’s “They Called Us Exceptional: And Other Lies That Raised Us (2023), (which I am still reading).
In all three, women of color courageously burn their pasts, including the pandemic years, out in the open, for everyone to feel the heat, inhale the smoke, and scatter the ashes in an act of sharing that is as much a part of their own healing as it is ours. It is collective healing that is both timely and timeless and much needed for those of us also unwilling to bury the recent past.
That Gupta, especially, was willing to expose her South Asian American family’s gradual and destructive unraveling at the hands of a society and culture that only cared about their success has been especially meaningful and inspiring, to me. Thanks to the three books, I am learning, for the first time in my life, that achievement alone is not the key to mental wellness. Authentic agency, buoyed by collective support and validation is the key–no matter the outcome or results.
Indeed, reading the women-of-color memoirs above has strengthened my own agency, buoyed by the inspiring examples of authenticity within all three. I am writing more poetry, my first love, than I have in a very long time. And I am sharing this poetry on social media, at local readings, and in workshops. I am making sure my voice is heard, with all its authentic breaks, cracks, and trembling, with the hope that maybe, just maybe, someone else can share in our collective healing, and, together, we can carry it into 2024.
Healing, after all, is always ongoing, especially as more crises, such as the genocide in Palestine, overwhelm us. Collective crises call for collective healing. Together, we heal better. And, in 2024, I plan to continue engaging in collective healing through memoirs by women of color. I hope more are written and shared, including, perhaps, yours. I hope you might join me in reading them, and in healing collectively together.
Online professor, writer, radio host, community collaborator, mother, daughter, and wife, Lata Murti is a lover of words and how they bring people together. She believes there’s no one right way to share your truth as long as it reminds someone, even if just the truth-teller, that they are not alone. She lives in Santa Maria-Orcutt, California with her husband, two kids, and dog, and her parents just a few miles away. Author’s photo by Stephen Heraldo.