Dirty River: A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home

Looking back at being a teenager the 1990s, it was a heady time of feeling like you could hit the road with a backpack and break all the rules and carve out your own life in a new city on your own terms in a subculture that wasn't going to make your life easy but would at least accept you as you were and support you in making all your own mistakes. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha did just that; she left a troubled family life in the US and found a sort of grubby, queer anarchopunk redemption in Canada. Her memoir is as intense and disjointed as her experience, "dreaming her way home" through stories of immigration court, queer South Asian dance nights, navigating a disability and processing the traumas of abuse, navigating the dirty river of the past and figuring out her own identity and her own life. We need more coming-of-age stories like this one for a generation that has finally grown up enough to look back on our past adventures and trials and start to put them all in perspective. If you were ever a lost, traveling kid, or just lost, or had to come to terms with a million intersecting identities in a cookie cutter world, this book is for you.