Book review: Gentrifier by Anne Elizabeth Moore

Every now and then you come across a book by an author who’s beyond brilliant yet is so confident about it that their prose reads easy and smooth, like a good vintage wine. That’s how it feels to read Anne Elizabeth Moore’s writing. She’ll blow your mind with her insights, but is so good with one-liners that her prose is concise — she never beats readers over the head.

I first became aware of her work when I read Body Horror a few years back. I’d never read — and still haven’t read — anything else like it. The book deftly weaves together essays on chronic illness, capitalism, and globalization together in a way that I still think about often. So I was already pretty confident going into her latest book, Gentrifier: A Memoir, that I was going to love it. And yet, it was even better than I expected.

Before I dive in further, (and fyi, this is a spoiler-free review) the synopsis:

Taking on the thorny ethics of owning and selling property as a white woman in a majority Black city and a majority Bangladeshi neighborhood with both intelligence and humor, this memoir brings a new perspective to a Detroit that finds itself perpetually on the brink of revitalization.

In 2016, a Detroit arts organization grants writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house — a room of her own, à la Virginia…