In this volume, the personal is always at war with the political, and boundaries – both geographical and personal— are often blurred, bombarded, beset.
Steinorth loves where words come from and how they sound against one another. She loves how they carry meaning and how meaning can overwhelm them. She delights in the history and connotations of the words she uses.
As narrator, Lizzie Benson is delightful company. Her mind is a wellspring of wry, cutting observations about motherhood, marriage, and…a possibly imminent apocalypse.
The Memory Police is a work of extraordinary artistic defiance, an exploration, urgent and seething, of the abrasive relationship between the role of dissidence in shaping public consciousness and the modern state’s totalitarian proclivities to create a political order founded on the organizational principle of fear.
Ultimately, The Ungrateful Refugee is an instruction book in how to be humane.