Damaged Like Me
Bring a reading of Damaged Like Me to your local bookstore, poetry slam, café or library.
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Social hierarchies cause damage. At the same time, people who have been damaged by this world—thrown away, marginalized, traumatized, oppressed—are more capable of apprehending harmful social patterns, precisely because they’ve needed to be vigilant about how the world works.
For too long, though, those with long-held rights and entitlements have claimed that survivors are biased about the very topics on which they have the greatest expertise. This powerful collection of essays reveals a complex social landscape—a living map of pain, survival, and compassion. A mix of personal memoir and sociological acumen, each piece seeks to build roads to a more equitable and loving collective culture of body sovereignty, racial justice, and gender liberation. They demonstrate the humane insights, approaches, and knowledge of those on the receiving end of inequity and violence, those whose “objectivity” on issues of oppression has been consistently maligned despite their having the most to teach us. |
Book Release Tour: Readings and Interviews
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Praise for Damaged Like Me
"The world split open again recently when I read Damaged Like Me by Kimberly Dark... Dark’s power is in her fearless writing and her ability to move between the personal and the public, the intimate and the academic. She writes seamlessly of her own trauma and damage as well as the tension and contradictions our culture has imposed... This book provides a roadmap to ‘come back’—providing directions for finding our damaged locations, for seeing them as places for regrowth, and for navigating the world in a body emboldened by love."
— Mom Egg Review
"By oscillating between powerful zoomed-out structural critiques and intimately zoomed-in depictions of trauma and love, this book succeeds at making oppression and change tangible on multiple levels. Throughout, this is more than an 'issue book.' Instead, the writing featured here is first and foremost deeply personal. Beyond that, it is strikingly embodied, drawing a portrait of damage that is particular and visceral as much as it is omnipresent. Perhaps most importantly, processing damage (as Dark does so eloquently) is found to bring forth loving transformation. This transformation shows how seemingly ordinary moments can have extraordinary potential for the self and the broader community."
— Fat Studies Journal
"The indomitable Kimberly Dark is back with her latest collection of essays to challenge and deconstruct normative narratives of “damage” including trauma, fatness, disability and queerness. Complex and layered, this volume is still endlessly readable and relatable."
— Ms. Magazine
"Damaged Like Me is a sociology rooted in the self — in a queer body, a woman’s body, a fat body, a sexualized body, a body defined into or out of whiteness or motherhood or lovability. Bringing to mind the works of Tressie McMillan Cottom and José Muñoz, Kimberly Dark skillfully employs scene, moments of bodies touching bodies, poetry, yearning, and structural complexity to unveil her theses. This memoir is a love letter to outsiders, in a way, but the kind of love that offers both tenderness and accountability. A demand for the best self that can show up on any given day — because best selves create better worlds."
— Erin Kate Ryan, Author of Quantum Girl Theory
— Mom Egg Review
"By oscillating between powerful zoomed-out structural critiques and intimately zoomed-in depictions of trauma and love, this book succeeds at making oppression and change tangible on multiple levels. Throughout, this is more than an 'issue book.' Instead, the writing featured here is first and foremost deeply personal. Beyond that, it is strikingly embodied, drawing a portrait of damage that is particular and visceral as much as it is omnipresent. Perhaps most importantly, processing damage (as Dark does so eloquently) is found to bring forth loving transformation. This transformation shows how seemingly ordinary moments can have extraordinary potential for the self and the broader community."
— Fat Studies Journal
"The indomitable Kimberly Dark is back with her latest collection of essays to challenge and deconstruct normative narratives of “damage” including trauma, fatness, disability and queerness. Complex and layered, this volume is still endlessly readable and relatable."
— Ms. Magazine
"Damaged Like Me is a sociology rooted in the self — in a queer body, a woman’s body, a fat body, a sexualized body, a body defined into or out of whiteness or motherhood or lovability. Bringing to mind the works of Tressie McMillan Cottom and José Muñoz, Kimberly Dark skillfully employs scene, moments of bodies touching bodies, poetry, yearning, and structural complexity to unveil her theses. This memoir is a love letter to outsiders, in a way, but the kind of love that offers both tenderness and accountability. A demand for the best self that can show up on any given day — because best selves create better worlds."
— Erin Kate Ryan, Author of Quantum Girl Theory
"Like a topo map that transcends our known meridians toward expansiveness and allows us to sit with the past to create a livable future, Kimberly Dark's Damaged Like Me invites us, from our "stigmatized positions," to step closer to our damage as sites of knowledge indispensable to our healing and our knowing. Through personal storytelling and intellectual inquiry, Dark generously restories these locations of damage as places of hope and regrowth, all while asking us to speak aloud how we come to love and let ourselves be loved. This book is an act of queer abundance."
— Cooper Lee Bombardier, Author of Pass With Care: Memoirs
“Kimberly Dark has forever transformed the way I understand sex, gender, and the notion of ‘damage.’ The patriarchy should be terrified of this book. The rest of us can stick it in our hearts—emboldenment for the revolution.”
— Ariel Gore, Author of Hexing the Patriarchy
"Kimberly Dark profoundly understands the power of storytelling to create change. Damaged Like Me begins with her body and reaches out toward new meaning-making in a burst of resilience and imagination. Each dazzling essay asks what we might learn from the tensions, contradictions, erasures and difficulties we have inhabited at the edges of culture, and how we may yet reinvent ourselves and new communities. These brilliant insights will illuminate new paths even through the troubled dark."
— Lidia Yuknavitch, Author of The Small Backs of Children, The Chronology of Water, and The Book of Joan
"In Damaged Like Me, Kimberly Dark weaves together philosophical thoughts, sociopolitical commentary and personal narrative, with writing so evocative that at times I felt I was Kimberly. Riveting, honest, and haunting truth-telling."
— Lindo Bacon, PhD, Scientist and Author of Radical Belonging and Health at Every Size
"There are few spaces outside of Disability Justice where the mess and mayhem of trauma is allowed to exist alongside abiding dignity. Damaged Like Me is one of them. Kimberly Dark has handed us a Shame Free template for telling all our shifting truths. A spell, in fact. We, the damaged, are emboldened to show up for ourselves and each other. We are given tools for blunting the stab of Bias. We are re-routed from the deceptive road-map that has us hell-bent on Triumph. Together we will be traitors to silence and we will survive this too.
These are stories of the ways trauma shapes us and stays with us. Of the broken-into body and just how much language matters. They detail the inter-related thought systems that perpetuate child abuse, racism, fat bias, and misogyny."
— Dr. Lucy Aphramor, Dietitian, Founder of Well Now, Co-author of Body Respect
"Kimberly's writing is intimate and haunting—she kicks you in the gut while holding your emotions in the palm of her hand."
— Jessamyn Stanley, Author of Every Body Yoga & Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance
— Cooper Lee Bombardier, Author of Pass With Care: Memoirs
“Kimberly Dark has forever transformed the way I understand sex, gender, and the notion of ‘damage.’ The patriarchy should be terrified of this book. The rest of us can stick it in our hearts—emboldenment for the revolution.”
— Ariel Gore, Author of Hexing the Patriarchy
"Kimberly Dark profoundly understands the power of storytelling to create change. Damaged Like Me begins with her body and reaches out toward new meaning-making in a burst of resilience and imagination. Each dazzling essay asks what we might learn from the tensions, contradictions, erasures and difficulties we have inhabited at the edges of culture, and how we may yet reinvent ourselves and new communities. These brilliant insights will illuminate new paths even through the troubled dark."
— Lidia Yuknavitch, Author of The Small Backs of Children, The Chronology of Water, and The Book of Joan
"In Damaged Like Me, Kimberly Dark weaves together philosophical thoughts, sociopolitical commentary and personal narrative, with writing so evocative that at times I felt I was Kimberly. Riveting, honest, and haunting truth-telling."
— Lindo Bacon, PhD, Scientist and Author of Radical Belonging and Health at Every Size
"There are few spaces outside of Disability Justice where the mess and mayhem of trauma is allowed to exist alongside abiding dignity. Damaged Like Me is one of them. Kimberly Dark has handed us a Shame Free template for telling all our shifting truths. A spell, in fact. We, the damaged, are emboldened to show up for ourselves and each other. We are given tools for blunting the stab of Bias. We are re-routed from the deceptive road-map that has us hell-bent on Triumph. Together we will be traitors to silence and we will survive this too.
These are stories of the ways trauma shapes us and stays with us. Of the broken-into body and just how much language matters. They detail the inter-related thought systems that perpetuate child abuse, racism, fat bias, and misogyny."
— Dr. Lucy Aphramor, Dietitian, Founder of Well Now, Co-author of Body Respect
"Kimberly's writing is intimate and haunting—she kicks you in the gut while holding your emotions in the palm of her hand."
— Jessamyn Stanley, Author of Every Body Yoga & Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance