Making a Scene

I enjoyed this book way more than I thought I would. Essay collections are usually just okay to me, sometimes good, and the audiobooks are easy to listen to while doing other things. I am not very familiar with Wu, only knowing of her from the controversy she talks about in this book - tweeting she was upset her show wasn't cancelled. I've never seen her act in anything.

But I found this collection pretty insightful and compelling, and in many places moving. Even when she is discussing something that on the face of it, I don't have too much interest in hearing about, she manages to write about it in a really interesting way. An example would be the first time she fell in love. I thought this was just a really good essay about how sometimes people slowly change and no longer want the same things, and the way she writes about it shows a lot of maturity and insight into herself and other people. She's also just funny a lot of the time.

There are two essays that really resonated with me. The first is a horrific story when her teacher didn't believe she was smart enough to have written something and she went to all of her other teachers, in front of Wu, and asked if they thought Wu was smart enough to have done it, and they replied no. Absolutely devastating for a child, and it reminds me of all the teachers who dismissed me as a kid because I grew up on a carnival.

The second is the one about rabbits. Her rabbit has the same disease as my rabbit does, and her talking about the whole situation and also the fact that her rabbit is getting old and she will soon miss the little things really got me. Also she defends loving rabbits well, which is something that's annoying in our society.

“people often ask me, ‘why do you love bunnies so much?' and I always want to ask back, “Why do we love anything?”. Listing reasons almost cheapens the love, in my opinion. I don't have an explanation for love. It's also an insulting question. Nobody asks, “why do you love your dog?”. Why is it that love for certain animals is understood, but others require explanation? Everything and everyone is loveable to someone, even if it doesn't make sense from the outside. Love isn't something achieved through merit, its something that happens with time. “