Gentrifier

Taking on the thorny ethics of owning and selling property as a white woman in a majority Black city and a majority Bangladeshi neighborhood with both intelligence and humor, this memoir brings a new perspective to a Detroit that finds itself perpetually on the brink of revitalization.

Accompanied by her cats, Moore moves to a bungalow in a new city where she gardens, befriends the neighborhood youth, and grows to intimately understand civic collapse and community solidarity. When the troubled history of her prize house comes to light, Moore finds her life destabilized by the aftershocks of the housing crisis and governmental corruption.

 

This is also a memoir of art, gender, work, and survival. Moore writes into the gaps of Woolf's declaration that "a woman must have money and a room of one's own if she is to write"; what if this woman were queer and living with chronic illness, as Moore is, or a South Asian immigrant, like Moore's neighbors? And what if her primary coping mechanism was jokes?

 

Part investigation, part comedy of a vexing city, and part love letter to girlhood, Gentrifier examines capitalism, property ownership, and whiteness, asking if we can ever really win when violence and profit are inextricably linked with victory. "Anne Elizabeth Moore is one of our great chroniclers of the collisions between the personal and the political. A contemporary A Room of One's Own, Gentrifier interrogates the relationships between class, race, gender, religion, sexuality, economics, love, community, and the medical industrial complex, all through the lens of Moore's experience of being given a 'free' house in Detroit. This story of a house, a city, and what it means to be a woman on one's own illuminates the utterly compelling complexities that lie beneath the veneer of what outsiders can glimpse in this one of a kind American city. Moore offers a window through which we can deeply examine the beauties, booby-traps, and at times Kafkaesque logistics of what it means to be an artist in the contemporary Midwestern landscape." -Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down Anne Elizabeth Moore was born in Winner, South Dakota. The author of several critically acclaimed non-fiction books, in 2016, Moore was awarded the third Write A House fellowship in Detroit, Michigan. Her most recent book, Sweet Little Cunt, won an Eisner Award, and her Truthout comics journalism series with Melissa Mendes was funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Hobart, New York with her cat, Captain America.