Bitter in the Mouth

Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong

I’ve been thinking a lot, in the weeks since George Floyd’s murder, about the enveloping quality of Whiteness. As i’ve talked with White family and friends, as I’ve written my own journals and thought my own thoughts, I’ve noticed more clearly than ever before the way Whiteness is rendered (culturally, through institutionalized and individual White supremacy) equivalent to “normal,” to “default,” to “natural,” “acceptable,” “good.” I’ve listened as people express their “individual” opinions, not even pausing to think how this seemingly personal thought has been conditioned and shaped by racialization as White. I’ve caught my own feelings, when I experience what feels like righteous grievance or frustration with individual Black people I work with, for example, becoming more problematized: how much of what I’m thinking or feeling at a given time is actually a product of my own racialization, my frustration more a result of losing control or authority, than because anything actually wrong or frustrating is being done?

In Bitter in the Mouth, Monique Truong takes us into the center of racialization as White and how, even under the most extraordinary conditions, this kind of racial conditioning can simultaneously render and be rendered invisible.

Set in 1970s small town North Carolina, but also tracking richly and fearlessly back in time, sometimes all the way into North Carolina’s colonial foundations, Bitter in the Mouth is the story of the Hammerick family. Told from the perspective of daughter Linda, the story is a flavorful one: Linda experiences lexical-gustatory synesthesia, with many words having a taste when she hears them spoken aloud. While she shares this fact with her best friend Kelly, Linda’s life is rife with enforced secrets. The silences between her and her parents, Thomas and DeAnne, are big enough to swallow up love, history, and intimations of truth in thirsty gulps, and Linda is left mostly on her own to investigate and create meaning from the world around her. Between Kelly and Linda’s other best friend, her great uncle baby Harper, Linda learns about secret, self-hood, trauma, families, joy, pain, and the shape of the space that can sometimes exist between ourselves and our dreams for ourselves. She explores photographs and barbeque and the vagaries of US American high school girlhood, but ultimately reaches adulthood with less a sense of herself and more compacted and invisibilized and unspoken traumas.

Told in two parts, the first part of the novel felt stronger, with the second half a prolonged resolution that could be read a few ways. Read in a paranoid critical way, the second part of the novel was a fairy tale of Whiteness, where the equivalent of the evil stepmother renounces her clutch on White silence and reveals herself to be good, quirky, wounded in and of herself, but all magically, as if with the waving of a wand, while main character Linda’s deep traumas go largely unacknowledged or resolved. Read reparatively, the second section is a gesture in defense of how the only way Whiteness’ enveloping and erasing qualities can be disrupted is through truth-telling and deep listening, though the viability of this reading breaks down for me due to its reliance on Linda’s sublimation of her own traumas in favor of DeAnne’s comfort and ability be seen as a “good person.”

This is a novel toothsome in many ways, rich with history, flavor, neuroscience, and the internecine entanglements of family and US America, transnational and transracial relationships. Worth savoring just as much as it is worth questioning, Bitter in the Mouth is a complex and succulent investigation of what it means to understand oneself; to come from people and a place.