Sarah O'Connor

I received this book from River Street Writing in exchange for an honest review.

“Labels are the armour that keeps us safe; they also keep us too heavy to move. They may have their uses for some, but it’s good to strip them off now and then so you can see what you’re dealing with. There’s an atomic lightness that comes with seeing people and things for what they really are at their root,” (Ghadery 107).

Ghadery’s memoir explores her struggles with disordered eating, mental health, while understanding her identity as a biracial woman.

I always give a lot of credit to memoir writers. I think it’s one of the hardest genres to write from. There’s always some sort of intimacy present with writing, but never as much as when it’s a memoir. For an author to openly write about themselves and their struggles takes an amount of bravery that I deeply respect.

Fuse isn’t a typical memoir as it doesn’t follow a linear narrative. Instead, Ghadery writes a series of essays that give an overarching viewpoint of her life. I enjoyed how Ghadery laid this all out in the Foreward of her book, acknowledging that while she thought she had thought she had a clear idea that she was going to write from she realized that in order to talk about the topics she wanted to she’d have to go much deeper into her identity and struggles as a biracial woman and how she is labelled by others.

I loved the variety of this book. Ghadery talks about her struggles with her own self-image when watching the movie Wonder Woman with her young daughter and mother. She explores her own anxiety and obsessive compulsive disorder which I appreciated as someone who struggles with both. While my OCD doesn’t manifest in the same way as Ghadery’s, I enjoyed her ruminations and understanding of it and felt very seen by how she acknowledged getting stuck in her own patterns. There were times where Ghadery talks about a lot of hurt, the different and unfair ways she was treated by her father as the only daughter and her desire to learn Farsi when the language was something her white mother felt alienated by. There is Ghadery’s acknowledgement of her struggles with addiction and her journey to becoming a wife and mother and learning who she is with the different labels that become attached to her,

I loved how honest and open Fuse was. Even when a memoir is honest it can sometimes feel like the author is holding back, but Ghadery lays herself bare in her book and that’s what makes it so powerful. I can’t wait to read more of her writing!

Publication: May 1 2021
Publisher: Random House Books for Young Readers
Pages: 170 pages (Paperback)
Source: River Street Writes
Genre: Non-Fiction, Memoir, Essays
My Rating: ⛤⛤⛤⛤
Summary:

Painfully and at times, reluctantly, Fuse probes and explores the documented prevalence of mental health issues in biracial women. Fuse has elements of memoir, but does not follow a traditional linear narrative. Rather, the book is a series of meditations that probe different parts of Hollay’s fractured biracial experience, including eating and anxiety disorders, self-mutilation, sex, motherhood, and the simultaneous allure and rejection of aesthetic beauty. In Fuse, Hollay speaks to the struggle to construct a fluid identity in a world that wants to peg you down: what you are, and are not. While Hollay’s experiences are personal, the issues surrounding the biracial identity are wide-spread. A dialogue on the tensions surrounding the female bi-racial mind and body is long overdue.