You Get What You Pay For

The award-winning author of Magical Negro traces her experiences of the trauma and beauty of existing as a Black woman through American history, from the foundational trauma of slavery all the way to Bill Cosby and Serena Williams

Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation that accompanies being forever-single (as in, never having had more than a situationship type of single) in a culture fixated on partnership. She traces this singular alienation back to an inability to feel truly safe with others, a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the foundational trauma of slavery. In this collection of sharp, reflective essays, Parker examines America's cultural history and relationship to Black Americans through the ages, through such topics as the Church's role in propagating segregation through faith-filled misreadings, the implications of Bill Cosby's fall from grace in a culture predicated on acceptance through respectability, and the pitfalls of visibility as seen through the mischaracterizations of Serena Williams as alternately iconic and too ambitious.

With piercing wit and incisive observations, You Get What You Pay For is ultimately a portal into a deeper examination of racial consciousness and its effects on mental well-being in America today. Weaving unflinching criticism with intimate anecdotes, this devastating collection paints a portrait of one Black woman's psyche—and of the writer's search to both tell the truth and deconstruct it.

Morgan Parker is a poet, essayist, and novelist. She is the author of the young adult novel Who Put This Song On? and the poetry collections Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up At Night, There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé, and Magical Negro, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship and winner of a Pushcart Prize, Parker's work has been hailed by The New York Times as “a dynamic craftsperson” of “considerable consequence to American poetry.” She received her bachelors in anthropology and creative writing from Columbia University and her MFA in poetry from NYU. Parker is a Cave Canem graduate fellow and creator and host of the live talk show Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. She co-curates the Poets With Attitude (PWA) reading series with Tommy Pico. With Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Shirley.