Kirjahaku

Miss Insecure: The Ugly Truth dives into the insecure mind of Maya, a young, black adolescent as she comes of age in the city of brotherly love The story is written through the eyes of a teenager using accounts of her life taken from the author's childhood diaries. She learns things the hard way as she mistakes sex for love and uses her body as a way to escape her internal sadness. Follow her one-track mind as she glosses her loose lips and marches in stilettos through life and ultimately becomes the source of her own pain.Alcohol and drugs become her means to escape the ugly truth. That is, her life is not what she imagined it would be and she fears it never will. Without guidance she is forced to make decisions on her own, feeling more lost each day she struggles to find herself. Her decisions land her into the abusive arms of Tyree, who becomes "her everything". As she reflects back to when she first lost her innocence she asks herself, "Will the pattern of abuse ever end?"

In this sparkling collection of stories drawn from the surreal edge of life, playful irony vies with more poignant evocations of solitude, mortality, and the dawn of sexual awareness -- all bodied forth in a language that is precise, elegant, and immediate. Storytellers are liars, but as Picasso said, "art is the lie that tells the truth," and deceit is a motif here: lies of omission or commission, in words or in deeds, to gain love or repel it, and beyond, to what our lies tell of the rift between body and soul, dream and fulfillment: the essential, often comical ambiguity of human existence. What do we really want? What do we need? And what happens if -- or when -- we gain the objects of our desires? From the strange erotics of household appliances and grocery shopping, anguish of an unexpected haircut, curious negotiations with sex -- including the mystically transformative power of a bikini -- to the shock of a child's first encounter with death, perverse seductions of imagination, tranced midnight zones of travel, and the dark revenge of a life unlived, this collection explores the borderland between inner and outer realities, creating a sharply etched portrait of fraught consciousness struggling for balance between the pains and sudden pleasures of being alive.