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55
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
30/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Daniel M. Lavery
Publisher:
Atria
Date:
February 11, 2020
Daniel Mallory Ortberg is known for blending genres, forms, and sources to develop fascinating new hybridsâfrom lyric rants to horror recipes to pornographic scripture. In his most personal work to date, he turns his attention to the essay, offering vigorous and humorous accounts of both popular and highbrow culture while mixing in meditations on gender transition, family dynamics, and the many meanings of faith.
What The Reviewers Say
Rejecting the suffering bildung often demanded of transgender writers, Ortberg’s narrative is anything but linear: It skips back in time to mythic Greece, traipses across the landscape of contemporary pop culture and, in one wonderfully fabulist entry that would make Carmen Maria Machado proud, slips outside of time altogether.
Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s Something That May Shock And Discredit You is three eloquent books in one: memoir, essay collection, and treasure trove of cultural analysis, all coming in under 250 pages. Ortberg is as nimble a storyteller as they come, so the shifts from painful personal revelations to pithy observations about Lord Byron turn on a dime while still mostly feeling part of the same whole.
A...kind of glee animates Ortberg’s writing, and it rushes all the way through this thoughtful, joyous book. Even when Something That May Shock and Discredit You delves into difficult material...Ortberg always writes with a sense of profound and honest delight: What luck, it’s another day where he gets to be a man. And reading, you can’t help but be delighted with him.
... a fusion of old and new Ortberg work. It’s a collection of chapters and fragments, pieces that refuse single identities.
