My Body Is a Book of Rules by Elissa WashutaRed Hen Press, 2014

My Body Is a Book of Rules is a memoir in essay form, but these essays aren’t just straight essays: there’s one (A Cascade Autobiography) that’s broken into sections and interspersed with other pieces; another is an academic paper about the use of the phrase “hooking up” by college-aged men and women, annotated after the fact with footnotes about Washuta’s connections to the students she interviewed; there’s one piece in the form of a match.com profile, with footnotes telling the whole story as opposed to the things one says in a profile on a dating site. Throughout, Washuta explores her identity as someone who is bipolar, as someone who is Native American, as a former Catholic who went to Catholic school for a substantial part of childhood, and as a rape survivor. The book includes diary excerpts about disordered eating and fucked-up body image; several essays take the form of lists, including a reverse chronological list of sex partners (counting back to the first, her rapist), a list of psych meds and experiences with them, and a list of books read. Like Marie Calloway’s fiction, Washuta’s memoir includes IM conversations; it also includes quotations from Mourning Dove and Black Hawk and stories of Catholic virgin martyrs. There’s one piece in the form of lines from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit juxtaposed with Washuta’s own experiences. This book is raw, unflinching, but there are also lyrical bits: I love this:

My mother, brother, and I would spend all year being the only Indians around, as far as we knew. In July, Indians from all over would converge at the local powwow, bringing with them beads and feathers, suede and abalone, weave and fringe. I wondered what they had been born with that I hadn’t, since we were all Indian yet they had these steps in them, these rhythms, these fur wraps and plumes that made them seem part bird or part otter. I wondered whether I would grow up to be Indian like that. I thought I might be part animal, too—part guinea pig, hamster, crawfish, cat, all my pets, as we got along so well when we played, and they understood me better than any classmate. (71)