Sarah Kasbeer: Dissecting the Damage

With A Woman, A Plan, an Outline of a Man, Sarah Kasbeer brings us a memoir in essays that pushes against the coming-of-age stories so many of us grew up with. Hers is not a straightforward story of becoming, but an unflinching unraveling of the forces that shape the ways a girl finds herself in the world.

Kasbeer’s experiences with the male gaze, male violence, and men’s love reveal how tightly connected many young women’s stories of selfhood are to something wholly outside themselves—or connected, rather, to people who consider that selfhood to be entirely beside the point. Growing up as a girl in patriarchy is not a new experience, but as proven by a new crop of books—A Girl is a Body of Water by Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi, Being Lolita by Alisson Wood, You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat, and Tomboyland by Melissa Faliveno, among others—the subject is at once startlingly universal and intensely individual.

Though they capture very different experiences, these books share an understanding that grappling with trauma is necessary to understanding the self. Kasbeer’s sharp, lyrical interrogation of her American girlhood illuminates both the quiet, everyday harm women experience, and the more volcanic damage that shapes not only how we see the world, but how we see and know ourselves. Her essays are not only about the formation of a self, but about the critical, often painful reconstruction of a self that follows.

I found myself not only furiously underlining passages, but feeling frequently shaken as I reconsidered chapters from my own past I had understood to be typical, benign, run-of-the-mill—and now recognized as anything but. Like when I lapped up praise for being “chill” while chastising myself for not feeling more relaxed. Or when my middle school principal reprimanded me for being “disrespectful” because I wrote a school newspaper article about the questionable motivation techniques practiced by male field hockey coaches. Or when I drank myself into blackouts for most of my early sexual experiences.

Kasbeer is particularly adept