Eula Biss's new book 'Having and Being Had' is about buying a house in Illinois — and the boxfuls of guilt and self-questioning she unpacked next
CHICAGO - Let's be clear: To read Eula Biss is to remind yourself that you are relatively illiterate, have never had a clear thought in your life, can't compose a decent sentence if you tried and should probably just shut up and go into marketing already. Or so I've heard. Is this the smartest writer in the Chicago area right now, on this day, in the late summer of 2020? Years ago, before Aleksandar Hemon left Chicago to teach at Princeton University, there may have been an argument. This is a parlor game, after all. But still, who else in the Chicago area, sentence for sentence, thought for thought, writes with more confidence, accessibility and provocation than Eula Biss?
Her choice of subjects alone - race, whiteness, consumerism, history, disease, vaccination, spread across four acclaimed books - has given her a bit of a Cassandra complexion. "Having and Being Had," her latest, about buying a home and much more, reads like a study in disquietude itself.
Circa 2020.
Not a week goes by, she told me, where she doesn't receive hostile mail, often about something she wrote years earlier. "On Immunity," her 2014 bestseller, addressed inoculation, fear and anti-vaxxers; "Notes From No Man's Land," her 2009 breakthrough, took on white privilege a decade before it was noted by corporate statements and at suburban cook-outs; "White Debt," her widely circulated New York Times Magazine
