Thin Skin
Essays
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF THE YEAR • A GOODREADS MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • Examining capitalism’s toxic creep into the land, our bodies, and our thinking, this incisive new work is “a visceral exploration” (Katherine May, author of Wintering) from a National Book Award finalist and a powerful literary mind.
"A wrenching, loving and trenchant examination of feminism, nuclear weapons production, healthcare, queerness and American life" —Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel
For Jenn Shapland, the barrier between herself and the world is porous; she was even diagnosed with extreme dermatologic sensitivity—thin skin.
Recognizing how deeply vulnerable we all are to our surroundings, she becomes aware of the impacts our tiniest choices have on people, places, and species far away. She can't stop seeing the ways we are enmeshed and entangled with everyone else on the planet. Despite our attempts to cordon ourselves off from risk, our boundaries are permeable.
Weaving together historical research, interviews, and her everyday life in New Mexico, Shapland probes the lines between self and work, human and animal, need and desire. She traces the legacies of nuclear weapons development on Native land, unable to let go of her search for contamination until it bleeds out into her own family’s medical history. She questions the toxic myth of white womanhood and the fear of traveling alone that she’s been made to feel since girlhood. And she explores her desire to build a creative life as a queer woman, asking whether such a thing as a meaningful life is possible under capitalism.
Ceaselessly curious, uncompromisingly intelligent, and urgently seeking, with Thin Skin Shapland builds thrillingly on her genre-defying debut My Autobiography of Carson McCullers (“Gorgeous, symphonic, tender, and brilliant” —Carmen Machado), firmly establishing herself as one of the sharpest essayists of her generation.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
National Book Award finalist Shapland (My Autobiography of Carson McCullers) explores the porous boundary between the individual and the wider world in these exhilarating essays. After suffering a summer of severe rashes, Shapland was diagnosed with "thin skin"—she's missing the layer of epidermis that "keeps the bad stuff out and holds moisture in," giving her a hypersensitivity to environmental pollutants. Cleverly, she uses this diagnosis as a metaphor to meditate on the individual's "utter physical enmeshment with every other being on the planet." Her inquiry takes her from the sands of Los Alamos, N.Mex., where she interviews Indigenous activists from communities riven with ailments caused by radiation left over from the Manhattan Project, to the aisles of Anthropologie, where she ruminates on capitalism's tendency to encourage a materialistic view of the world that privileges property and ownership above other types of relations. In "Strangers on a Train," Shapland reflects on how "cultural narratives" affect individuals, describing how the fear she sometimes feels for her safety while travelling alone is the legacy of a societal tendency to view women as in need of saving: "As a white woman I am not an agent, I am biding my time until victimhood." It's hard not to marvel at how the author draws unexpected conclusions from a diverse array of anecdotes, illuminating the profound ways in which individuals and the world shape each other. This is a gem.
Customer Reviews
Brilliant and challenging
Shapland reimagines the world as it might be and probably should be. She’s a unique thinker and a brilliant writer