White Girl tells the first-person story of a girl coming of age in a school that feels like an Urban Hieronymus Bosch painting, swarming with tit-heckling bullies, racist bitches, a teacher who screens Simpsons episodes and a molsetering classmate. The Chomo in the title is explained by a footnote on the cover (the book has lots of marginalia scrawled throughout, such as ‘This is the cunt of the book. Don’t touch it. Books have cunts.’ in the center): ‘Chomo is the way cool ppl say child molester as in, “Check out the vice principal’s chomo glasses.”‘ The narrator’s interior world is molested by thoughts of being a ho, an obsession with Anne Frank, a suspicious lesbianism, her own racial identity (Molack – Mexican + Polish), and this kid sitting next to her who keeps jamming his hand in her pudding. It’s incredible not only for the story itself, but for the langauge Gurba uses, which feels like the newest, most original way of saying anything. I truly know no writer who speaks like her on the page, and it makes you feel like you’re dangling on a tightrope through the story, never knowing what sort of punch her next abject-fantastical line is going to throw – gross, too real, tender, shocking, always sickeningly funny.
Michelle Tea