Review: This Accident of Being Lost by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

The author seems to have put a lot of herself in this book. Or, at least, there are some intensely intimate passages that feel so neurotically and emotionally particular, and so I imagine the author has to have drawn a lot of these lines from the contours of her soul. Maybe she embellished a bit here, amplified a bit there, and twisted in strands from people she's known over these threads. Is it strange to move through the world when so many people know these pieces of your heart? Or, rather, imagine that they know these pieces of your heart?

The unifying themes of these short stories are love in the digital age and being indigenous while settler capitalism destroys the planet. In the first theme, Leanne explores modern experiences like the strange intimacy of online friendships, the overthinking that comes with 15-minute gaps between messages, the way interactions can be quantified and analyzed, the way the real world and the digital world bleed into each other. In the latter theme, Simpson shows rich examples of indigenous connection to the earth, not the sappy stereotyped "Mother Earth is so powerful. The water is so sacred" kind of platitudes settlers want to uplift (to quote a sarcastic line from the final short story), but what it means to feel connection to a place and to your ancestors, the struggles of weaving in modern living and tradition, and sharing these experiences with people.

Not every story or song was to my tastes, but the highlights were meaningful to me.