Miriam Gerba's first book, Mean, was a true crime memoir and ghost story,

detailing Miriam's own coming of age as a queer chikana and surviving sexual violence, among other

traumas. The assumption Miriam found was that the confessional art she was making must be inherently

cathartic. To Miriam, it was anything but. Her newest book, Creep, Accusations and Confessions,

is a sort of response to that assumption. An informal sociology of creeps and how we challenge them.

Miriam and I talk about life after leaving an abusive relationship,

the complicated blowback to her viral critique of the book American Dirt,

and the tension between wanting to be well-liked and being, well, a little mean.

Miriam, thank you so much for doing this.

My pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me.

One of the ways your first book, Mean, is often described as like a queer Chicana coming of age story. You and I are about the same age. There were not a lot of Latina stories. There were not a lot of Chicana stories. There were not a lot of queer stories, period. Then you start layering those identities on top of each other and it really didn't feel like they exist. So I wonder if you recognize the first time that you saw yourself reflected back to

you in literature? I have never seen my entire self reflected back in literature. I've seen fragments of myself. I wrote about one of

these moments in creep in the essay that I have that is critical of Joan Didion. So when I was a

senior in high school, we took the AP literature exam and the booklet contains excerpts from various works,

and then the students analyze them.

And I remember coming across an excerpt by Joan Didion that pulled from Los Angeles Notebook,

and in that same test booklet was an excerpt from Sandra Cisneros as the House on Mango Street.

And I was flabbergasted because here I had a piece of prose that articulated the

interiority of a Chicana having a birthday.

And then several pages later, I have a description of California

weather that I'm very intimate with. And so it's in moments like that that I find fragments of

myself, but seldom do I find those fragments fused, which is why in part I wrote Mean was to take

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