Extra Credit: Myriam Gurba Video

Timothy Beresford

Myriam Gurba is the author of Mean. Mean centers around a coming of age story of a queer mexicana as she feels haunted by the ghost of Sophia Torres. Mean focuses on issues such as racism, homophopia, and rape culture. She writes about these dark topics with humor.  I watched Myriam’s Gurba reading at Suny Cortland for extra credit. Something that really caught my attention and threw me off guard is Gurba’s demeanor. In my head and after reading how vulgar and descriptive the book gets, I think I accepted her to be a lot more gruff and extreme. But she is completely soft spoken and soft in her tone. She reads her memoir and talks about it so comfortably, which she would have to as she wrote it and published it to the public. I found that the delivery of the jokes were different from what I read in my head. Gurba reads her memoir as it is intended and it completely makes you think about it differently. Gurba says that writing Mean was a very fractured process. She started to write it 6 years before it was actually published. She never intended to create one continuous story rather just fragmented ones. The first few writings of Mean were completely different from the published story. I thought it was extremely fascinating when she said she initially intended for one of the sexual assaults to be from the perspective of a butterfly and that just seems very grabbing and unique. There are still elements of that in the book though with the blades of grass during the sexual assault. Gurba says that many sexual assault writers will do this and become a third person perspective of the assault and the environment. Considering how dark the book is, I was surprised to hear that there were many things that she did not include in the book as it was extremely hard to talk about. It makes me only imagine how difficult it was for her to write about the things that actually ended up being in the book. Gurba did not purposefully have any specific reader in mind, but she wanted to focus her approach on the book to other writers. She wanted those writers to be able to write about trauma in a different way, with vulgarity and profanity. She also wanted the book to be intended for sexual assault survivors. It was an invitation for them to look at the experience and situation differently. Overall I really enjoyed watching this event as it gives you a totally different outlook on the book. Most of that is due to the way Gurba talks about the book.