White Girls

'I defy you to read this book and come away with a mind unchanged' - John Jeremiah Sullivan

"I see how we are all the same, that none of us are white women or black men; rather, we're a series of mouths, and that every mouth needs filling: with something wet or dry, like love, or unfamiliar and savory, like love"

This is an extraordinary, complex portrait of "white girls," an expansive but precise category that encompasses figures more diverse than you might think. With blazing intelligence and insight, Als travels through the last decades of the twentieth century, from Flannery O'Connor's rural South, through Michael Jackson in the Motown years, to Jean Paul Basquiat, Brooklyn, and the AIDS epidemic in nineties New York, in order to unravel the tangled notions of sexual and racial identity that have led us to where we are today. Deftly weaving together brilliant analyses of literature, art, and music with fearless insights on race, gender, and history, White Girls is one of the most provocative and original books about the culture of our time.