With the devastating Supreme Court decisions over the past week and the continuing horror show of Trump revelations, I needed to kick back and enjoy a multifaceted appreciation of a young politician who is one of our greatest voices today, and who I like to dream may someday be president: Take up Space: The Unprecedented AOC, 370 pages of words and pictures put together by New York Magazine, and published in February.
The book is divided into multiple sections, fitting for our social media world and for one of its best practitioners. The first two hundred pages are a comprehensive biography by Lisa Miller, studded here and there with pointers to subsequent chapters in the book by other authors on various topical subjects.
And the book’s mostly celebratory tone is set by the introduction by Rebecca Traister, entitled Before AOC, After AOC: Politics can be divided into two eras.
It can be maddeningly difficult to write about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez without sounding extreme, like a fangirl or a hater. That’s because her trajectory is itself extreme; to simply lay out the facts of her three-year entrance into and rise within American politics is to trace the path of a rocket….I often have to remind myself—every time I tune into one of her speeches, like one of her tweets, watch an Instagram video of her dog stealing bites of dinner, and then wait for whatever it is to send her critics into apoplexy and her fans into ecstasy—that however powerful she is, however solid her political base feels, the fact is that there is no model for what she’s doing. Going from zero to Congress, primary victory to superstardom, political neophyte to fetishized celebrity, the Bronx to Vogue, bartender to House floor, Democratic Socialists of America member to souvenir votive candle. And all that unprecedented power—all that extremity—is also what makes her position so precarious.
In the biography section, we learn of her Nuyorican childhood, and her parents move from the gritty Bronx to the suburban Yorktown Heights, aiming to give their children greater opportunity. We see high schooler Sandy Ocasio, Harry Potter fan, taking the improvisational approach to prepping for her winning science fair presentations, grounded in deep learning used to engage and connect with her audience. We see her starting a pre-med curriculum at Boston College, with the thought of becoming an OB-GYN, but returning home when her father became gravely ill at age 48. She was 18 when he died. We learn of the effect her junior year study abroad semester in Niger had on her.
We learn of her struggles after college, as she realized that all her science fair wins, her graduating cum laude, her leadership program fellowships, didn’t necessarily translate into success for a young Latina woman. Exhausted and needing to pay her bills, she turned to waitressing and bartending.
We learn of her growing political activism, her trip to the Standing Rock pipeline protests, and her ultimate decision to enter politics. And all that is just in the first hundred pages. The second half of the bio offers an in-depth account of her House career thus far.
For the remainder of the book, we get all sorts of treats. We get looks at her political development and beliefs.
We get a look at her boyfriend—and as of last month, fiancé—Riley Roberts. We get a series of stills from the ‘dance scandal,’ where some MAGAhead on Twitter dug up an old video from her undergrad days of AOC reenacting a dance scene from the movie The Breakfast Club, captioning it “Here is America’s favorite commie know-it-all acting like the clueless nitwit she is.” She responded to the stupid attempt to humiliate her by posting a response video of her dancing to Edwin Starr’s War outside her Congressional office. “I hear the GOP thinks women dancing are scandalous. Wait till they find out Congresswomen dance too! Have a great weekend everyone :).”
We get her makeup tips posted with Vogue Magazine, and we get her razor-sharp Twitter takedowns of politicians and journalists. We get her skillful grilling of high-profile witnesses in Congressional hearings.
We get the text of her Instagram Live chat following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in which she bonded in grief with her viewers while also offering ways to keep fighting the long game. We also get her Instagram Live recounting of her harrowing experience on January 6th, as the Capitol was under siege.
In all, this book gave me the boost I needed in these perilous times, which too often seem to border on the hopeless. AOC’s passion, her intellect, her command of the issues, her adeptness at communicating in the modern age, and her fearless way of being herself, whether serious or goofy, is an inspiration. It makes me want to believe, and, more importantly, it makes me want to do my part in the work that needs to be done.
THIS WEEK’S NEW HARDCOVERS
- Why We Did It: A Travelogue from the Republican Road to Hell, by Tim Miller. Former Republican political operative Tim Miller tries to answer the question no one else has fully grappled with: Why did normal people go along with the worst of Trumpism?
- The Colony: Faith and Blood in a Promised Land, by Sally Denton. The story of the 2019 mass shooting connected to a strange, cult-like polygamist Mormon offshoot that settled in Mexico in the 19th Century.
- Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home, by Kate Mangino. An informed guide about how we can all collectively work to undo harmful gender norms and create greater household equity.
- The Last Resort: A Chronicle of Paradise, Profit, and Peril at the Beach, by Sarah Stodola. Guilt-trip yourself on your beach vacation with this look at the history, pleasures, and the social and ecological disasters of beach resorts.
- I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys, by Miranda Seymour. An intimate, profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea, based on new research in the Caribbean, a wealth of never-before-seen papers, journals, letters, and photographs, and interviews with those who knew Rhys.
- Inheritance: An Autobiography of Whiteness, by Baynard Woods. This left-leaning journalist thought he had successfully escaped the racist attitudes of his South Carolina boyhood, at least until the day he was shocked to be accused of discriminating against a Black student. In this memoir, Woods takes us along on his journey to understand how race has impacted his life. Unflinching and uninhibited, Inheritance explores what it means to reckon with whiteness in America today and what it might mean to begin to repair the past.
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