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Whenever I come across a friend who hasn’t yet read Myriam Gurba’s 2017 memoir, Mean, I’m almost jealous. It is, to be sure, no easy read—detailing Gurba’s experience with sexual assault and repeatedly having her boundaries crossed while growing up as a queer, mixed-race Chicana in Santa Maria, California—but Gurba’s inimitable writing style and habit of training an unflinching gaze on little-acknowledged parts of the world around her make reading Mean a genuinely unforgettable experience.
Now, five years later, Gurba is back with a longer, wider-ranging essay collection titled Creep: Accusations and Confessions, which she describes as an “informal sociology of creeps,” and which delves into everything from the fundamental injustice of the carceral state, to Joan Didion’s body of work, to Gurba’s own family. (The essay she pens about her cousin Desiree’s painful history of sexual violence and incarceration is particularly moving.) Vogue recently spoke to Gurba about telling Desiree’s story, who she writes—and doesn’t write—for, and leaning into the therapeutic potential of cooking and baking while writing.
Vogue: How does it feel to be so close to Creep coming into the world?
Myriam Gurba: It feels weird! I get nervous; I have some anticipatory anxiety.
I’m such a big fan of Mean. What’s it like to shift from telling parts of your own story to telling the stories of others (your cousin Desiree’s, for example)?
I was so excited to be able to do that, because I am very devoted to my family. I did a lot of work at the altar I keep in my home, appealing to my ancestors for guidance as I was writing the book. They really asserted themselves and inserted themselves into the narrative, so in some ways, the book became a family history and a family memoir, I think. I kind of approach the collection as as a memoir that’s being communicated through assemblage; typically, people approach memoir narratively and then chronologically, but I was thinking of memoir more as a kind of installation work. My family is key to that, and they came to be a part of that assemblage.
There’s a lot of painful material in this book that can’t have been easy to write about; how did you set boundaries or enact care for yourself during that process?
I think when you’re dealing with material that probes the experiences of sexual violence, there’s only so much self-care that a person can engage in, because if a person is going to be very probing and self-reflective, that’s going to require not just the examination of wounds, but their reopening. There’s a bit of necessary or mandatory bloodletting that happens with this sort of work, and you have to prepare yourself for that. I meet with a trauma-informed therapist on a weekly basis, and I was doing that as I was working on Creep, but then there were also different therapeutic interventions that I was introducing into my own day-to-day life in order to be able to maintain my psychological, emotional, and spiritual health. One of the practices that I employed a lot was culinary therapy, so I cooked and I baked a lot. When I was working on Creep, I found that following recipes and working with my hands was very comforting and soothing. I would go back and forth between working very passionately on the prose, and then if it was particularly challenging or difficult, I’d passionately commit myself to cooking or baking, and I really mastered my craft. I really mastered my tortillas. [Laughs.]
Have you gotten any favorite reactions to the book so far?
I appreciate the response that some readers have had to the essay that I wrote on my cousin. My cousin very, very, very much wanted to have the story of her criminalization told by somebody who is close to her and could explain the gendered and the racial politics of what happened to her, so I’m really happy that I’ve been able to work with her to to gain control of that narrative. I’m also glad that people are coming to understand how it is that survivors are criminalized and impacted in such shitty ways by state violence.
Is there anyone you’d be particularly happy to have this book make it to?
Well, I’m not a writer who writes for everyone. I feel like my intended audience is actually very small. I feel as if when I write, I’m having a very exclusive party, and if people do happen to wander in, they can stay as long as they behave themselves. I get really annoyed when people announce that either they write for themselves or they write for everyone, because that’s bullshit. Nobody writes for themselves, and nobody writes for everyone. I always have my former students in mind when I write; I imagine how my former students would respond if they were to encounter my work, and they are part of the audience that I’m always writing to and writing for. And then there are certain people whose eyes and ears I would love to be able to reach—like, the name that comes to mind immediately is Angela Davis. I think I would die of happiness if I could get a stamp of approval from Angela Davis.
