STARRED Book Review: Sympathy for Wild Girls

Reviewed by Andrea Marks-Joseph

Queer Black women float, grieve, steal, sweat, and fight back in this thrilling connection of stories that put us first.

“Daisy’s mother tells her ways to stay safe, but they all come off as futile superstitions… Don’t go anywhere silent and gentle; leave marks, bite marks, claw marks, anything that can be evidence later.” In the first and titular tale of this short story collection, we meet Daisy, a young woman who can’t shake the disturbing truth of being a potential victim of violence every day of her life simply by existing. She “thinks of every pair of eyes that could have ever possibly raked across her body,” and does everything she can think of to make herself undesirable, to make people turn away from her. She stops washing and begins avoiding eye-contact, attempting to inspire disgust and disinterest as a means of self defense. It’s a desire every woman faced with these truths has considered, incorporating preventative tactics into our lives—knowing that nothing will ever be enough to protect ourselves from the ever-present threat of gender-based violence, but desperately needing to do something to try. 

As I write this review, there’s a collective sense of fear and hopelessness settling over women of color in South Africa, where I live, because of a recent murder of a young woman. But we still have to go to work, buy groceries, make our parents proud, fall in love. This is a reality for Black women: the reality of dating, the reality of being a mother, a daughter, a wife, a teenager who has a crush, the reality of living life day to day against the already crushing backdrop of classism, racism, and the infuriatingly familiar “quirks” of being noticed in public as Black and queer and whatever specific quality is all your own. 

Author Demree McGhee said “society’s violence against us is hell, but we deserve great fiction”—and gives us twisted, twisting tales that pull us in and take us on a ride we couldn’t possibly see coming. These stories are all so soaked in queerness and Blackness that the identity of our protagonist is always undeniable while they’re on myriad fictional rollercoasters.

Sympathy for Wild Girls explores class consciousness in young people; the tormenting shades of toxic masculinity; the delicate folds of female friendship; and the concept of desire as danger, as a road to death (threaded firmly and fiercely into many of the stories but also captured brilliantly by this line: “I didn’t know what to do with my body when it wanted. I only knew how to smother and scream in place of desire.”) 

Demree McGhee captures the elusive truth behind conversations between teenage girls, both filled with awe and simmering with heavy notes of comparison. She conveys the visceral sensuality of another woman applying your makeup while unpacking the difficulty in seeing the true shape of your body and face after years of avoiding yourself. She also writes about the sense of wonder in seeing women who seem completely unburdened by such concepts: “She sat in her body as if she was the only one who ever had to look at it.”

Sympathy for Wild Girls does a great job on the politics of smell too, introducing us to realistic women who do everything they can to avoid their own bodily odor and those who go to extreme lengths so that the women around them will never know they sweat. There’s a dissection of femininity and wealth inequality in every mention of odor, the author exposing the sick influence of generations of impossible, nonsensical hygiene standards on Black women in particular. McGhee also writes insightfully (and disturbingly) about memory, dreams, and the role of scent in building our futures. “I had worked retail jobs since I was thirteen, and most of them left me with some new fear or sense of disgust. I associated the smell of sizzling meat with scraping spit-logged gum off the bottom of tables in my parents’ restaurant. I was a vegetarian until my freshman year of college.”

While occasionally leaning into the speculative, these stories are deeply rooted in reality, introducing us to women whose lives are as complex as our own, women who could very easily be our neighbor, our co-worker, the woman we recognize from the coffee shop every weekday morning, or the daughter of the family who suddenly stopped coming to church last year. 

In Sympathy for Wild Girls, runaways meet religious groups with a strong social media following and a strict idea of cleanliness in the eyes of the Lord. The author writes all of this so beautifully, offering up moments of contemplation on something otherworldly before turning the volume on real life all the way up again—I’m talking about lines that felt like a sledgehammer to my solar plexus: “My mother always wanted me to be grateful for things she didn’t do to me.” And phrasing like a mother describing the idea of her baby looking just like her with the words “She felt like a mirror I pulled from my body.”

In “She Is Waiting,” we meet Ava, who began to float (needing to constantly weigh herself down with rocks to stay on the ground) after she was kidnapped from the park and held captive for a week. She was rescued, but the kidnapper was never identified or caught. Ava, who “woke up in the air, the bedsheet draping her body like a tablecloth, haunting her own bed.” Ava, who is so lonely while grappling with the complexity of surviving the kidnapping, enduring flashbacks and feeling like she’s back in that moment years after everyone’s moved on around her. 

One of my favorite stories, “Butterfruit,” weaves together the stigma and societal shifts in the acceptable frequency of hair washing, depending on whether you’re white or Black, rich or poor. Demree McGhee brilliantly incorporates threads of the main character’s compulsive coping methods—which involves both cleanliness and inhaling cleaning products (“I didn’t have real faith in anything that didn’t have the power to physically change what it was touched, the way bleach made a room simmer with absence” “I sprayed my sheets until they were wet with Lysol. I drenched my windowsill in Fabuloso, wiped my fingerprints off every surface, and got dizzy off the scent of being washed away”)— and contrasts it against her counterpart, who is part of the church’s social media team, branded ‘clean’ in all the visible forums, but messy in her secrets that begin to spill over. This story should be taught in schools! I can’t help imagining the lively discussions that the many vibrant and vital topics this story touches on will inspire in students. There are many twists in this one, and there’s a reveal that made me gasp out loud.

I’ll be thinking about “Throwing Up in a Gated Community,” the devastating story about two girls of very different social and economic classes, who fall into an intimate friendship the way many teenage girls (and many, many queer girls) do, for a long time.

Sometimes McGhee hits these poetic and thought-provoking endings that feel wholly satisfying, while other stories are concluded midway through their unraveling—when things are about to turn inside out and collapse. It’s like someone closing the door on us right as the conversation we’re eavesdropping on gets really juicy. They are not necessarily abrupt endings that leave the stories feeling unfinished but ones that leave the reader with meaning instead of resolution. Even this is testament to McGhee’s immersive writing, because each time this happens, I sat for a few minutes with all the possibilities I was sure would happen next, imagining all the ways the protagonist would mess it up or get into trouble. I always wanted more.

One of the stories that provides a reflective yet mysterious conclusion, and certainly one of my favorites of the book, is “Exchange,” following a young couple who shoplifts regularly while grocery shopping. They fall into a sweet but blurry-edged domestic polyamorous relationship with a store employee who approached them to say she’s watched them steal for a full year and wants to learn their ways, wants to get to know them. Her presence reinvigorates their relationship with each other, and for a moment in time they are thriving as a trio. But then the temptation of stealing a big-screen TV comes between them and everything they were once sure of changes in a blink.

Sympathy for Wild Girls is a book about how “the men who seek girls’ bodies like flowers to yank from the ground” have shaped generations of women, young and old. These stories explore the systemic and inescapable violence Black women are born into and how it floods into every aspect of their lives, from their self-actualization to their friendships with other women. In addition to the difficult themes I’ve mentioned above, readers should note that many of these stories include descriptions of the both the actions and mindsets of characters who experience: suicidal ideation; child abuse and neglect; domestic violence; unwanted pregnancies; abortions; a kidnapping and time in captivity; and animals being killed and dismembered. 

Demree McGhee depicts the way grief climbs into your bones and reacts chemically with the core of who you are. There are multiple stories focused on compulsive behavior, exploring body dysmorphia and disordered eating, including anorexia, bulimia, and hypergymnasia: “I would excavate the weight from my body until the bones of my throat, my shoulders, my hips breached the surface of my skin. I would carve myself into something gorgeous from all angles.”

I highly recommend Sympathy for Wild Girls for readers of color and especially queer readers of color, who will find that reading it feels comfortable in a way that is so rare. It’s effective, electric storytelling that hits different because it’s you on the page. There’s a thrilling additional level of unsettling achieved in the way the author pulls at threads she knows will make us squirm. Sympathy for Wild Girls is a privilege, an honor, a gift to the community, and a captivating collection I’d be proud and excited to recommend to friends, family members, and fans of Dr. Ally Louks. 

Thank you for reading Dr. Ally Louks’s book review of Sympathy for Wild Girls by Demree McGhee! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.

The post STARRED Book Review: Sympathy for Wild Girls appeared first on Independent Book Review.