Larry Benjamin's Blog: Larry Benjamin's blog - This Writer's Life - Posts Tagged "spam-identity"

There’s a woman in Germany named Mel here on Goodreads who writes wonderful reviews—insightful, and entertaining without giving away too much away. She caught my attention because she has been going through my books and reviewing each one. She started reading Damaged Angels and posting reviews of each story.

Her review of my short story “Spam” caught my attention. Of it, she wrote:
Oh my... this one’s a riddle. At least to me. It’s kinda impossible to say what’s real and what not. And while I’m confused, I still appreciate this. In the end it doesn’t really matter what exactly went down here.

Her review led me to decide I would dedicate this blog post to explaining that story.

Spam,” is, in a way, a story about identity. Identity has been much talked about. First it was gay identity, then transgendered and gender non-conforming identity (though I think gender non-conforming identity has always existed and been talked about). Then, there was the recent fallout over Rachel Dolezal’s identifying as black.

I’ve always wondered: when it comes to identity—who are we?—Are we who we appear to be? Or who we believe we are?

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