Quick Take
- Narration: Morgan Jerkins reads her own essays with a directness that borders on confrontational, no softening of her sharper observations, which is exactly what this material demands.
- Themes: Black female embodiment, cultural erasure and visibility, intersectional identity in elite spaces
- Mood: Incisive and urgent
- Verdict: One of the most intellectually rigorous personal essay collections to emerge from the intersectional feminist tradition, Jerkins narrating herself is not optional, it is the whole point.
I picked this up on a recommendation from a colleague who described it as the book that made her highlight entire pages. By the time I was halfway through the second essay, I understood what she meant. Morgan Jerkins writes as though every sentence is load-bearing, which in a collection this tightly argued, they frequently are. This Will Be My Undoing arrived with significant advance praise and a formidable cultural presence, and the audio version, narrated by Jerkins herself, turns out to be the essential format.
Jerkins was in her mid-twenties when this collection was published, and that youth is part of what makes it remarkable. She has the analytical fearlessness of someone who has not yet learned to hedge, combined with a literary intelligence that suggests extensive reading and careful thinking. The question she takes as her central subject, what does it mean to exist as a Black woman today, is not new. Her approach to it is.
On Being Doubly Illegible
The collection’s governing argument is that Black women occupy a position of particular invisibility within American public life: marginalized within both the mainstream feminist movement and the broader conversation about racial inequality. Jerkins builds this case not through statistics or sociology but through personal experience rendered with analytical precision. She is her own primary source, and she treats that source with the rigor she would apply to any external text.
The essay that made her reputation, “On Dating White Guys While Me,” is as sharp in audio as it reads on the page, sharper, actually, because Jerkins’s delivery of her own more cutting observations has a wry control that print doesn’t fully convey. Her analysis of how her early romantic choices functioned as a form of internalized racism is not self-flagellating; it is diagnostic. She is not confessing, she is examining.
The Cultural Archive She Builds
What is particularly striking across the collection is the breadth of cultural reference Jerkins deploys. Sailor Moon, Rachel Dolezal, Michelle Obama, the stigma of therapy in Black communities, the category of “the fast-tailed girl,” the specific experience of being a Black visitor in Russia, she moves across this territory with a confidence that refuses to separate the high-cultural from the popular, the personal from the political. The essay on Russia is one of the collection’s most unexpected pleasures: a record of encounter with racial categories that operate completely differently from those Jerkins navigated at home, which illuminates both contexts by juxtaposition.
One reviewer who had half the book highlighted described the experience of reading in a state of continuous recognition, crying at the passage about Michelle Obama, squirming at the cheerleading tryout essay. This is accurate to the audio experience as well. Jerkins has a talent for articulating social experiences that many Black women will recognize immediately but have rarely seen rendered in print.
Where the Arguments Reach Their Limit
The collection is not without weak points. Some of the later essays in the sequence feel slightly less fully developed than the collection’s first half, as though the tightest pieces were front-loaded. The essay on disabled Black women within the “Black Girl Magic” movement raises genuinely important questions but resolves them less decisively than the material warrants. These are minor complaints against a collection of this ambition, but worth noting for listeners approaching with particularly high expectations.
Jerkins’s self-narration is, as noted, the correct format for this material. Her voice has an edge when she wants it to that no hired narrator would replicate. She doesn’t perform vulnerability or soften her sharper observations for the discomfort of a general audience, which is exactly the posture the essays require.
Who Should Listen and Who Should Skip
Listen if you value personal essay as an analytical form rather than a confessional one, or if the intersection of race, gender, and cultural visibility in America is a territory you are actively thinking about. Jerkins narrating herself adds a performative dimension that makes this the rare case where audio is genuinely superior to reading. Skip if you approach personal essay primarily for narrative comfort, this collection is deliberately uncomfortable, and Jerkins intends that discomfort as a feature rather than a limitation. Listeners who found Roxane Gay or Kiese Laymon challenging may want to calibrate expectations accordingly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Morgan Jerkins narrating her own essays change the experience significantly?
Substantially. Jerkins has a specific delivery for her more pointed observations, a dry precision that doesn’t translate fully to print. Her narration also conveys the emotional investment behind essays that read coolly analytical, particularly the cheerleading and Michelle Obama sections. Self-narration is the recommended format.
How does the collection address the ‘fast-tailed girl’ concept specifically?
Jerkins examines this figure, a controlling label applied to Black girls perceived as sexually forward or threatening, as one of the mechanisms through which Black female sexuality is policed and stigmatized. The essay contextualizes this within both historical and contemporary frameworks without reducing it to a simple argument.
Is this collection appropriate for readers new to intersectional feminist theory?
Yes, though Jerkins writes analytically, not pedagogically. She doesn’t define her terms for uninitiated readers. Someone new to intersectional feminist thinking will understand the essays but may want to read additional context. The collection is challenging but not inaccessible, her personal grounding makes abstract concepts concrete.
What does the title ‘This Will Be My Undoing’ refer to?
The phrase comes from the title essay, in which Jerkins reflects on the accumulated weight of being a Black woman navigating American public life, the ways in which that navigation extracts a continuous psychological and physical toll. It is not a prediction of personal failure but a reckoning with structural cost.
