A New Book for the True Crime Girlies

After her friend Carolyn Bush is brutally murdered in the fall of 2016, writer Sarah Gerard becomes obsessed with trying to understand how this could happen. Gerard conducts hundreds of hours of interviews, scours legal documents, and reads a seemingly endless number of news articles to try to find answers. Eventually, she uncovers some shocking truth about her friend’s life.

As someone with a disability, I love reading other disabled people’s stories and seeing how each is its own unique creation. In Golem Girl, Riva Lehrer shares how she was born with spina bifida. At the time she was born, there was very little support for parents with disabled children, and Lehrer internalized a lot of the ableism that she saw around her. But when she discovers a group of artists who use their work to express the deepest parts of themselves, Lehrer finds a new medium to work through her feelings around her identity.

Literary powerhouse Morgan Parker is out with a new collection of essays that examine Parker’s feelings of alienation in just about every part of her life. She describes living with depression and a deep sense of loneliness. Her experience with disability impacts every aspect of her life. She shares stories of her white therapist, who proved unhelpful in Parker’s experiences as a Black woman with mental illness. In other essays, she expands from ideas of the personal, giving her readers a bigger picture of Black life in America. Morgan Parker is truly a gem of a writer and one with a unique perspective always worth reading.