The Riots

by Danielle Cadena Deulen

Constantly surprising, these personal essays explore the attractions and dangers of intimacy and the violence that often arises in close relationships. Deulen's artful storytelling and dialogue also draw the reader into complicated questions about class, race, and gender. In "Aperture," she considers how she has contributed to her autistic brother's isolation from family and from the world. "Theft" investigates her mother's romantic stories about conquistadors in the context of the Mexican heritage of her biracial family. Throughout the collection Deulen experiments formally, alternating traditional narrative with "still life" essays and collages that characterize a particular time, place, and sensibility. Deulen is remarkable in her ability to present her own confusion and culpability, and she also writes with compassion for others, such as her own suicidal and unpredictable father or a boy in her class who sets the teacher's hair on fire. In part because she herself so poorly fits the identities she might be assigned--white in appearance, she is in fact half Latina; raised in a poor neighborhood, she has acquired an education associated with the middle class--Deulen sees "otherness" as a useless category and the enemy of intimacy, which she embraces despite its risks. The Riots seeks to create what Frost called "a momentary stay against confusion," and Deulen investigates her own act of creation even as she uses the craft of writing to put parentheses around the chaos of continuous living.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

188 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 2011

Reviews

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brave and beautifully rendered in Deulen's poetic style, this marvellous memoir sets the project of life in stark relief, emphasizing the heartbreak of the relationships we can't change and the damage so firmly rooted in the past as to be inextricable from our lives, which we so carefully build on top of the ruins. Utterly moving.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

First I have to confess I'm not generally a fan of memoir. I picked this book up off a freebie shelf because it was in a beautiful jacket (I'm a sucker for good design) and because it had the GLCA New Writers Award seal on the cover. That said, I savored every essay.
Duelen has a powerful, open, intense voice that, I admit, is sometimes disturbing in her honest depiction of childhood poverty, desperation, family abuse, addiction, and escape. I seldom read more than one essay at a time, often leaving much time between sessions with her. But the poetry in her prose kept me engaged, and I'm really glad I read through to the end. She captures the loneliness and invisible isolation of her childhood while describing feeling both the sense of alienation and of siblingship among her brother and sisters. She expresses a complex and significant relationship to her physical geography that I particularly like, bringing the reader into various environments throughout American West. Both the damp, fertile, urban rot of Portland and the searing, bone-dry toughness of SoCal/L.A. had a sense of home beneath. Other essays take place in New Mexico, Kenya, Spain, Wisconsin, Virginia... and Duelen describes each place with the personal-yet-tangible accuracy of a fully present traveler.
In the end this set of essays hang together as an eloquent love-letter to the messy family that created her, homage to the ancestors, geography, and random events that create each of us. I will definitely be checking out anything else I can find by Duelen. (Especially if it's not memoir...) Her writing is beautiful.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

(4.0) Powerful topics/events, bordering on poetic writing

I wasn't surprised to read that she's also a published poet. She shifts her style around from piece to piece, but much of it is rhythmic and calls out to be performed. I particularly appreciated the earlier pieces and the one about the 1992 LA Riots and her experiences during the aftermath. She's had a tough time growing up and this is a powerful way to repurpose that negative energy.

Minor bugs:
- atriums instead of atria
- using I as an object
- gauge when she meant gouge

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful, honest, hilarious & totally heart wrenching at times.

[Annie Noble · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I ever write a memoir, I want it to be all the things this book is: candid, tender, shattering, and inspirational.

[Ariel · Rating 5 out of 5]

A poetic collection of personal essays with crisp, evocative, original language. Painful and inspiring.

[Ally Parsons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Assigned reading for a college class, and I finished it in one day. Absolutely gorgeous writing, staggeringly poetic even though it's a creative nonfiction essay collection. Amazing and moving.

[Jessica]

One of the most gorgeous, powerful memoirs I've read.