Enjoy For Free Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir Originated By Akwaeke Emezi Released Through Text

have no words.

I've had the pleasure of reading both sitelinkFreshwater and sitelinkThe Death of Vivek Oji so I knew I would be inhaling Emezi's memoir as soon as I could.
Dear Senthuran has solidified Emezi as one of my favorite authors of all time, Any time they come out with something new, I will be reading it immediately,

This memoir is not an easy book to read, Emezi has chronic depression and has lived through several suicide attempts, Reading about their struggles and how being an author on tour only exacerbated their depression is something readers and fans almost never see.
We see the shiny, polished author who puts their best face forward during the extent of the tour where as many cities as possible are crammed in.


So much of this book is about pain, But it's also about becoming who you are, The thing I related to the most was Emezi's struggles with gender and defining exactly what their gender was, Plus dealing with dysphoria and taking steps to treat it, They also discuss how this impacted their relationship with their mother,

This book took a knife to my soul and it felt like someone finally understood the thoughts in my head I haven't been able to verbalize.
Read this book as soon as you can,

CWs: Death, emotional abuse, homophobia, medical content gender affirming surgeries, misogyny, racism, religious bigotry, sexism, self harm, sexual content, suicidal thoughts, suicide attempts, toxic relationship, transphobia, body horror, mental illness depression.
CW: suicidal ideation, transphobia, racism, mental illness

Emezi made news the frustrating way when an author whose name I will not speak doubled down on antitrans sentiments specifically against Emezi, and right around when this book came out.
I would have read it regardless, because I'm a completist so far when it comes to this fantastic author, but those actions moved it up in my reading.


Emezi is not limited by this lifetime by their own telling, and that concept alone is fascinating to read about, and how that belief impacts relationships.
They relate their journey as an author from gaslighting during their MFA program to trying to live off a poverty level advance to achieving a two book deal from Riverhead Books good move! their belief that their path is as a writer dictates the decisions they make and I was impressed.


It's told through letters but since I listened to the audio read by the author I'm not sure that structure worked as well in that format, but of course Emezi's voice was a bonus.
Q:
I learned that humans are meat,

I learned that we can bear much more than we predict,

We can, I promise you, bear much more than we predict, c
Q:
Sometimes the fire is not fire, Sometimes its not everything that burns, c

A tour de force of my new favourite author, What a find!
Q: The magician who loves me c

Now, this one's really raw and incredible, The author's so very brutally honest about pretty much all the things we often hedge about: life, money, gender experiences, sex, passion, spirituality, home, aesthetics, being 'not of this world', the magical.
. . the everything. She hedges nothing and is therefore one of the most powerful storytellers I've had the honor to meet across pages,

Okay, I'm worried about the guy's sis: it looks like she got lots of painful accidents! Poor girl,

So, the narrator considers the possibility of being sn ogbanje A spirit who looks incredibly convincing as a human Now, that's an engaging thought.


Reading:
Q:
When my parents discovered Id started reading the sexadvice columns in my mothers magazines as a child because I had run out of material, they quickly bought me more books.
c LOL! What a lifehack!
Q:
, . . elevenyearold me was in awe at finding a book that Id first read about inside another book worlds eating worlds, all made by words.
c
Q:
Id also read Cyprian Ekwensi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Buchi Emecheta, Chinua Achebe, the secret copy of The Joy of Sex hidden away in my parents room, every encyclopedia entry in my school library on Greek mythology, labels on shampoo bottles, the sides of cornflakes boxes and Bournvita tins during breakfast, countless contraband Harlequin and Mills amp Boon romance novels bartered with secondaryschool classmates, narrative interludes in my brothers video games, and all the parts of the Bible that referenced sex.
c
Q:
I tell Katherine about Alain Mabanckous Broken Glass, punctuated with commas alone, and Helen Oyeyemis Mr, Fox, storytelling within storytelling, blurred realities, I use my phone to pull up the ebook of Fran Rosssnovel, Oreo, and show her the first two pages, with the diagrams and the equations, the magnificent things Ross did with structure.
“Thats an alive reflection,” I say, “Its the kind of work youd think only white writers get to make, ” c
Q:
Ive been a reader all my life I know books can be many things, My favorites are the ones that function as portals into other constructed worlds, Ive loved those since I was a child its why I read so much speculative fiction, Some books are windows into anothers experiences, or even into our owndemonstrating our raging desires to be seen and to see ourselvesbut I wonder if it is enough, this reflection of known things.
c

Lovely parts:
Q:
The truth felt like a story, I wanted to tell them how we never had running water, how cockroach eggs gelled into the egg grooves of the fridge door, how the concrete over the soakaway broke and stayed open, the rancid smell becoming part of our air.
We longed after green apples that were too expensive, three for a hundred naira swinging in a plastic bag, and we knew the intimate taste of ketchup smearing red on white bread, the cheap oiliness of margarine mixed into boiled rice, the accompanying shame.
I didnt say any of this, c
Q:
I learned other things in Aba: that a mother you see once a year is a stranger, no matter how much you cry for her in the long months when shes gone.
c
Q:
After I wrote Freshwater, I had to reconcile with the fact that Im not even human, What does that mean about how I see life, or, more important, death I am thinking of the place I grew up in and the self that was formed there, the version of me who knows that a body is meat but also someones child.
I am thinking of how the darkness can live inside your memories, even as a town goes aflame twenty years ago, c
Q:
This will make sense shortly, c
Q:
The robot was called a da Vinci, c
Q:
even when it means stepping out of one reality to be swallowed by another, I continue choosing to move toward myself, c
Q:
Id stepped out into nothingness only to be caught by the grace of God, c

Now, this is a wonderful recipe for a new writer!
Q:
The future fans out in brilliance, powered by imagination and ego and hope and a thousand other things, but all that glory can be condensed across time into the choice to sit and write words down.
It doesnt even have to be done wellthats what revision is for, It just has to be completed, There is such a space, a stretch of desert, between imagining something, writing it, and then finishing it, Execution is a particular discipline, something built out of corded rigor, tight and greased with sacrificial blood, There are many components to this spell: how to make the task at hand the only one that is real how to work when you dont want to how to summon your want and collar it for your purposes, setting it to work.

I bribed myself with the future, I dangled the things I wanted in front of my greedy eyes, and in the flush of that desire I reminded myself that writing five hundred words right now would reel in the world I wanted.
There is always something you can do right now there is always a first step, no matter how small it is, Seeds are often tiny, and it means nothing about what they will grow up to be, You plant them anyway, and thats what making the work is,
I dont think everyone believes that it can be that simple, but again, Im not sure how making and fulfilling your own prophecies works for other people.

If you say yes with enough force, your chi will say yes, too, My chi and I are hurtling forward at breakneck speedfaster than my body can handle my flesh breaks down at this pace, I believed in the spell with everything I had, and maybe that is the generator powering it allthat utter belief, Not on its own, but the actions that are fueled by it, c
Q:
What happens after you make the work might be uncertain, but one thing is guaranteed: If you dont make the work, nothing will happen.
Discipline is just a series of choices, With the spell, we can understand that each choice is carving out a future, finding our way out of the desert, Trust me,

its glorious on the other side, c

Death and suicidal ideation:
Q:
Death has always been the thought that calms the hungry avalanche in my head.
Just meditating on it lifts the weight of this world a little, I measure danger by proximity to an actual suicide attempt, how close did I flirt this time, that kind of thing, c
Q:
A few days later, I fly to San Francisco, and then to Seattle, Death flies with me. c
Q:
I talk to Alex, who has had to live with the possibility of losing me for almost a decade now, and they are terrified, but they tell me how theyre not the one who has to live with it, so they cant say anything, they cant really tell me to stay.
I appreciate that, because so many people tell me to stay without knowing what theyre asking, the kind of pain theyre willing me to just continue being in, and they cant imagine that this pain has been there since I was little, since before I can remember, always and constant, and my whole life is a calculated distraction to try and get away from it.
I always knew writing my books couldnt keep me alive forever, that they would run out and Id need something else, a new treatment plan, because Id developed a resistance to this one.
You will always, at some point, want to die, c

On embodied nonhumans:
Q:
For embodied nonhumans, existence is more difficult than I can ever put into words, no matter how many books I write.
c.