‘Creep: Accusations & Confessions’

by Laura Moreno

“Creep:Accusations & Confessions” is a truly worthy new collection of essays about the evil that exists all around us. It is written by the very talented Mexican-American writer Myriam Gurba. As insightful as it is poetic, it explores the knife’s edge between sanity and madness.

The book opens memorably: “It’s easy to get sucked into playing morbid games.” The first chapter delves into childhood memories of little girls cutting their Barbie dolls’ hair, something Myriam Gurba was not allowed to do. “My mother had put that rule in place after I tried giving myself Cleopatra bangs.”

The girls reenact dramatic soap opera-inspired scenes of lesbian love and hatred with their Barbie dolls. (They didn’t own any male dolls.) “They yelled, wept, shook, and made murderous threats. They lied and broke promises. They trembled, got naked, and banged stiff pubic areas. Clack, clack, clack...”

Gurba’s vivid description of the child’s play culminates in the children throwing their emotionally tormented Barbies out the window ten stories

From page 18 the USA team and our girl who has done so much for women in sports, LGBTQ people in sports, support with her fontanel, and the children play Delivery Room pretending to give birth. Once her imaginary baby died and twice she herself died in childbirth, as if trapped in the curse of Genesis with no way out.

Her father recalls that Bela Lugosi (who played Dracula) came to town to be treated at the State Hospital for

Drivers sometimes fell for it hook, line and sinker.

The book also goes into detail about her very interesting family history in Mexico that touches on the history of the nation. Warts and all, Gurba hones in on some of the illusions that have guided the lives of her male ancestors in particular.

Stupid Stunts and Real Abuses

Intriguingly, the book offers little-known stories of people like Night Stalker Richard Ramirez, the son of a terribly abusive police officer and firearms expert who did not want his boy to join the police force; drug addict William Burroughs, author of “Naked Lunch” who accidentally killed his 28-year-old wife while performing their William Tell stunt for guests in Mexico City; and Carlos Salinas de Gortari, future president of Mexico, who at age 4 accidentally shot and killed a maid while playing.

Each story is a perfect storm of the stupidity and/or abuses that infect corners of society. Tragedy is never fomented out of nothing.

For example, Richard Ramirez’s war hero who had just returned from combat in Vietnam. The tattooed vet relished recounting his experiences in graphic detail to the 12-year-old boy: his countless war crimes –researchers have claimed a Mai Lai Massacre occurred about once per month, only the press wasn’t there to document them all– against Vietnamese civilians, and his 29 taxpayer-funded killings (more victims than the Night Stalker) of Vietnamese people simply for being Vietnamese.

Perhaps the Night Stalker’s victims were indirect casualties of LBJ’s war, a war that significantly darkened and marred the American mindset.

Gurba astutely observes, “Richard slept on the grave of the outlaw John Wesley Hardin, a gunslinger who committed his first murder at age fifteen. Hardin proceeded to take 39 more lives and perhaps his spirit slithered into Richard, intoxicating him with frontier poison.”

She also notes that serial killers are “not rare when you consider how many people cops, soldiers, prisons, and insurance companies kill.” This isn’t the first nation to descend helplessly into madness.

Simply by speaking the truth, even before “Creep” was published, Myriam Gurba has been punching above her ments of the population.

When she was asked to review the book “American Dirt” for Ms. Magazine, she called out the book for being filled with negative Mexican stereotypes. The tragic tale recounts the journey of migrants to the US, but it is written (some say cartoonishly written) by a self-described white woman with no first-hand knowledge of the subject matter. Gurba read the book while she was visiting Mexico and found it almost unreadable. It angered her. Nontheless, it was featured nationally as an Oprah Book Club selection, making it a pre-ordained bestseller. When Myriam Gurba turned in her negative review of the book, her editor told her she was not famous enough to write a negative review of this book, so Gurba published it elsewhere and kicked off a national debate.

Latinx writers are painfully aware that in the 25+ years that Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club has existed, improbably, no book by any Latinx author has ever been featured. And no publisher, it seems, went to bat to correct the oversight until now, thanks to Gurba’s book review.

Myriam Gurba previously wrote the highly acclaimed memoir “Mean” and formed Dignidad Literaria with other writers to help correct the current state of affairs in publishing.t for Black athletes and trans athletes and just a generally decent person who has changed how we look at women and sports. We hope she gets to take her team to victory once more.

The first U.S. Women’s World Cup match July 22 drew a combined audience of 6.26 million on Fox and Telemundo, making it the most-watched soccer telecast in the U.S. since last year’s men’s World Cup final. It was also the largest combined Englishand Spanish-language audience for a U.S. women’s group stage match. And so exciting! The U.S. team welcomed newcomer Vietnam by slaughtering them 3-0. The next U.S. match is

Wednesday night (July 26) against the Netherlands.

So for the scary and the sweet, the sublime and the ridiculous, you know you really must start composting at home and stay tuned.t

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