You Get What You Pay For
Essays

Quotes

“With her essay collection, You Get What You Pay For, bestselling poet and writer Morgan Parker . . . uses scintillating cultural criticism to examine her own struggles with loneliness, singleness, and depression through the lens of being Black in a white world. She also looks at how the predominately white media has covered Black celebrities . . .With You Get What You Pay For, Parker creates a safe space where she can feel free to express herself on her own terms.”—TIME

“Morgan Parker’s poetic sensibility is at the forefront in You Get What You Pay For . . . Parker draws on both her personal experiences—with writing, therapy, beauty culture, and relationships, for instance—as well as bigger cultural phenomena, like the complex legacy of Serena Williams and Bill Cosby’s fall from grace, to reflect on Black women’s experiences throughout American history.”—W

“Morgan Parker’s You Get What You Pay For tracks a Black woman’s interiority with trenchant insight and puckish humor. Parker explores the epigenetic effects of structural anti-Blackness through her powerful meditations on loneliness and depression. She carves out her vulnerability with a poet’s scalpel.”—Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings

“In a series of moving personal vignettes, astute political observations, and piercing social commentary, Morgan Parker’s vibrant collection of essays deftly examines the shifting contours of race, romance, memory, and mental health. At once cogent and humorous, You Get What You Pay For is an engrossing journey through Parker’s expansive and gifted mind.”—Clint Smith, author of How the Word Is Passed

“In You Get What You Pay For, Morgan Parker interrogates the project of self-making while illuminating all the forces at work trying to warp reality and mangle the self. This is the kind of book that saves lives.”—Saeed Jones, author of How We Fight for Our Lives and Alive at the End of the World

“With her latest book, Parker extends her command of cultural critique and lyrical self-deprecation to the personal essay . . . In 23 searing chapters, Parker confronts respectability politics, singlehood, her childhood in the ‘mayonnaise suburbs,’ and the shadows cast by Kanye West, Bill Cosby, and Serena Williams. Threaded throughout is the ongoing story of Parker’s experiences as a Black woman in talk therapy, a practice that, not unlike autobiography, points the way toward self redefinition.”—Oprah Daily

“An acclaimed Black poet examines the state of her soul through the lens of race. . . . [Morgan Parker] is good at snappy titles, clever formulations, and bitter humor, all of which are on display in these provocative and personal reflections, structured as a kind of symphony of themes and metaphors. . . . As Parker writes, ‘Words are ductile, delicate, and loaded like that.’ Never more so than in her capable hands.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review