You Get What You Pay for: Essays

The award-winning author of Magical Negro traces her experiences of the trauma and beauty of existing as a Black woman through American history, from the foundational trauma of slavery all the way to Bill Cosby and Serena Williams

Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation that accompanies being forever-single (as in, never having had more than a situationship type of single) in a culture fixated on partnership. She traces this singular alienation back to an inability to feel truly safe with others, a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the foundational trauma of slavery. In this collection of sharp, reflective essays, Parker examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the Church's role in propagating segregation through faith-filled misreadings, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.

With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating collection paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche—and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.