Customer Reviews

Inside Out: Reflections On A Life So Far

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I would highly recommend this book to anyone who read Runaway and wanted to know what happened to Evelyn Lau. This book tells the reader about what has happened in the 10 years since Runaway was published. She discusses the long-term effects in her life of being a prostitute and the depression that she copes with. The language that Ms. Lau uses to describe her emotions, her perceptions and her thoughts is absolutely beautiful. In my opinion, she is one of the great writers of our time.

However, this book is not light reading. It discusses very serious issues and Ms. Lau is not afraid to explore her humanity within the essays that she writes. An excellent book!

but I really loved this book, and felt it needed a review.

It's a very quick read, and covers alot of Runaway: diary of a street kid. So some people may not like the repetativness of it.

She talks about depression, parents (and her relationship with them) her struggle with prostitution and more.

It isn't a happy read, but if like me, you do suffer from depression and like to read something you can identify with it's good.

She also talks about herself as a writer, why she writes how she almost stopped..
I'm a huge fan of evelyn lau and I wasnt' disapointed by this book.

Lau is one of a few contemporary authors that I have been interested in for a long period of time. She is interesting for her unique material and work ethics that bear a series of important works. She never fails to surprise me every time when I access her new work, and I am constantly looking forward to her newer one.

Yet this collection of essays offers an unusually fulfilling reading experience and I almost conclude that I cannot expect anything better than this. The clear, candid and artful on-going report on her life distinguishes herself as a rare talent once again. Lau this time benefits the genre and eloquently articulates a couple of issues that she never covered before such as examination of the issue of racism in Canada.

She touches upon racism she encountered and how the experience formed her characteristic psyche of a minority in the society as she grew up. Due to the negative reception, she felt inferior and had trouble having confidence in herself. This testimony adds the irreplacably valuable vocabulary to minority experiences in North America where is still dominant the Eurocentric standard, and is the rest dismissed. Note that she lived it a couple of decades ago, when the phenomena were obviously harsher. All the more, the author's journey of establishing herself as an individual, refusing any conpromises no matter how it got difficult, read paradoxically to be the universal struggle, therefore her unique accomplishment. Although this could give commonly an impression that her works were the rootless hybrid of an Asian-North American English literature, readers discover in this book that she was also a product of the social structure where she struggled to belong and developed into an idiosyncracy at the time. This time, or all in her career as a writer, Lau managed to draw the uncharted territory to locate the very complex point where she was situated, and where she would like to move onto. I am moved by her courage, once again, but in the strongest sense.

Despite the understatement of the stigma as a woman of color she resorted to, being marginalized according to her ethnicity and how it ironically contributed to the sensationalism that her first book 'Runaway' needed to provoke---the apparent voyeurism that catered to the average audience in Canada at the time---, in this book, Lau lucidly contemplated that her seemingly uncommon manner of assimilation was somehow a part of the institution that indirectly coerce minorities to assimilate until their identities vanish, ----just as her parents had attempted to render her in the new world. Her confused and complexed love for fatherly men was the metaphorical manifestation of her complex desire of belonging somewhere safer than her own parents, whose power to protect her from early on was very limited in the society.

The topics in this colleciton, such as depression, her impossible relationships with men and her acknowledgement of the practice of love is a condition, a form of transaction, the fear and spiritual growth she went through during the trial, which was brought about by her writing about her former lover, Kincella, were neither cheerful nor easy. Stragely enough, though, they are truly the work of art. I tried to figure out what possibly made them sound so powerful; I should name her courage as one reason. She writes those without fear or favor, as William Vollmann praised her work before. Her writing never sounds like an idle talk essay that people could read just comfortably and forget when they are done with it. Lau's words come from her living them. As she made it clear once again in this collection, she is determined and would sacrifice herself as a fuel to ignite a fire to give life to what she writes. Even though it would cause another enormous pain, she is fearless and knows how to let the fire burn. What could we do but applaud?