Games Without Frontiers

Myriam Gurba’s voice is brash, funny, unexpected, and honest. These qualities drew attention in 2020 after she wrote a scathing takedown of the stereotypes, cultural misrepresentations, and appropriation in Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt. The piece continues to be misrepresented by aesthetically conservative critics and journalists, who frame Gurba’s interest as shutting down speech, rather than as presenting a knowledgeable and engaged critique. It is just one of the smart, lively, and sometimes painful essays gathered in Creep: Accusations and Confessions, which ranges from private to public and back again, and is governed by an indomitable spirit.

The opening essay, “Tell,” suggests the terrain the collection will explore: “It’s easy to get sucked into playing morbid games,” Gurba writes, playing off Wittgenstein, who posited that “games form a family.” Games of varying degrees of darkness recur throughout the book. “Tell” introduces snapshots of Gurba’s family, as well as the “games” she’s played with romantic partners, some of which have gone disastrously wrong. “Locas,” meanwhile, uses family as a springboard for the explicitly political, starting with a game Gurba and her cousin Desiree played as teenagers, pretending they were a two-girl “make-believe mafia” called Pocas Pero Locas, meaning “few but crazy.” Both young women, the essay reveals, had things they wanted—or were required—to hide from their families. Desiree, for instance, had been sexually molested by the distant cousins who were her babysitters and tried to commit suicide to make the incest stop. She would later join a gang.

And yet, even in the midst of this, Gurba finds an unlikely kind of beauty. Once, she and Desiree toured a ghost town, and the author’s father told them to act as if they were dead inside a casket. As Gurba recalls, they “came very, very alive, laughing and waving so fast our hands blurred.” Desiree told Gurba it was OK to be queer—she also kept getting locked up. “Locas” addresses all of that, along with the seething history of the 1943 Zoot Suit Riots, when Mexican American youth were assaulted by white servicemen and off-duty cops, as well as of the war on drugs.

Not every essay is so intense. “Waterloo” takes on queerness through historical and personal lenses. Though it starts with Ellen DeGeneres coming out, it quickly moves to the murder of Matthew Shepard, and then, surprisingly, to Gurba’s experience interning at the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office, which leads to a relationship with Sam, a white woman from Iowa.

The women take a road trip to visit Sam’s family. What follows is a dance of back-and-forth stereotypes, with black-comic scenes of Gurba holding back, making quips only to herself in response to repeated racist remarks. She never holds back on the page, however, so half the humor, and half the pathos, too, arises from encountering all the biting comebacks she mostly doesn’t deploy.

Gurba catches us off guard with her unusual twinning of compassion and lacerating observation. In one scene, she writes that Sam’s nephew has “skin so translucent it exposed his circulatory system.” Later, she opens her dresser and finds dead bugs all over her clothes. The boy has put lightning bugs in her drawer after hearing Gurba tell his grandmother she likes how their “butts light up.” She thinks about how he’s “harvested insects in the hopes that I’d open my drawer and be surrounded by blinking angels. Instead, I got winged death. No matter. The translucent child’s intention was beautiful. For the first time, I felt welcomed by this family.” It’s hard in this moment not to laugh with pleasure, but Gurba is never one for ending on this kind of note. Instead, she swerves again, into a memory of making the family dinner. It’s not tender, but cleverly satisfying.

Creep’s investigation of humor and comic logic, especially that invoked while undergoing—surviving—the horrifying, deepens further with the essay “Slimed.” Here, Gurba teases out an erudite philosophy of the joke, built around the idea that jokes reorganize social space: laughter as a form of protection. Gurba’s (now ex-) wife is an aspiring stand-up comic. She doesn’t want her spouse to be funny. So Gurba hides her humor on the page as she writes Mean, a memoir of sexual assault that upends expectations with games and wit. (The book was selected for the California Book Club.)

Notwithstanding the resilience her humor reveals, the title essay—which is the longest in the collection—is an emotionally strenuous read, and maybe more heartrending for the mix of play and horror that’s come before. Scenes arrive in staccato to chronicle Gurba’s experience surviving domestic violence, a relentless and humiliating torture perpetuated by a man with whom she lives; she refers to him as Q. While she eventually obtains a restraining order, the protection is both long overdue and insufficient to address a misogynistic society. As we have throughout the book, we see again the bleak injustice of the legal system, the way the interpersonal is adjudicated when it comes to women, especially queer women, especially women of color, who have been made victims by controlling men.

At one point, Gurba writes, “Analytical essays are autopsies and we’re not supposed to laugh at dead bodies, not even when the body is a clown.” While these essays are full of rigorous critical thought, there’s an intoxicating, lived quality to Gurba’s style of analysis, her willingness to expose the funny and the cruel and the grotesque in a single breath. Gurba doesn’t so much dissect her life or California history as she holds an elaborate wake, reframing our understanding of humor as a means of survival. She is an indelible contemporary voice, and we are the better for it.•