Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir

By Vidyan Ravinthiran

WW Norton 2025

The title of Vidyan Ravinthiran’s new book, Asian/Other: Life, Poems, and the Problem of Memoir, raises a whole batch of what’s commonly called “red flags” immediately. “Asian/Other” clearly signals a concentration on identity politics (and, it almost goes without saying, fraudulent, manipulative identity politics, since Ravinthiran was born in Leeds, lives in Massachusetts, and teaches at Harvard), and “the problem of memoir” clearly signals, well, that there’s a problem with memoir-writing. There isn’t. When authors allude to “the problem with memoir,” they usually mean, “I’m going to do a poor job writing this memoir.”

It almost seems like Ravinthiran is aware of some of this himself, since he addresses identity politics as soon as his book starts, in a passage that shows two things very clearly:

Yet what life is, and how to live it – how, rather, it lives us – has never puzzled me more. The large subject that I and my reader have in common begin to morph beyond understanding. What happens to identity politics, when we recognize that “identity” is nothing like as simple as we pretend; when activism takes seriously what psychology and neuroscience tells us about personhood? (If we are other, potentially mysterious, to even ourselves, this means we’re also rarely – despite demands placed on minorities – anything like experts, or untroubled owners, of our experiences.) What political alternative exists, to our incandescent, algorithmically envenomed appropriation – yes, I’m redefining that term – of world events to our dopamine-canalized, outrage-addicted brain chemistries?

There’s quite a bit to be seen in even such a brief passage, but as noted, two things stand out. The first is that Ravinthiran is indeed going to indulge in the full range of the manipulative sham that is identity politics. All the signs are there: the hints of discrimination this author has never experienced, the specter of “othering” (as mentioned, the author was born in Leeds and currently teaches at Harvard), the invocation of psychology and neuroscience even though the author knows nothing about those disciplines, the suggestion that the author is not, in fact, engaged in identity politics because (insert gaslighting hand-gesture here) identity politics isn’t what it seems, and so on. And the second thing, even more obvious: the prose in Asian/Other will be atrocious.

It turns out there’s nothing to be done about the prose, alas, but the contents of the book aren’t always insufferable. They mostly are, as when Ravinthiran mentions that his son Frank “was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when he was two and a half,” or when he mentions the damages worked on his wife Jenny by both childbirth and their idyllic life in Massachusetts, which somehow left her mute, incomprehensible, and, apparently, a victim in Dracula: “Jenny had always spoken quietly. Now she couldn’t make herself understood to others: people here asked her to repeat herself, and still misheard,” he writes. “I sensed her slowly disappearing (feeding Frank had made her very thin). Had emigrating and immigrating destroyed us?”

But thankfully, it isn’t always completely insufferable. Sometimes, especially when the author is talking about literature (perhaps unsurprisingly, since this is what he teaches at Harvard), the book is only partly insufferable. The discussion of Keats in particular is often interesting, although even here, the navel-gazing of identity politics is never far away, as when Ravinthiran insinuates that he’s uniquely positioned to understand the poet’s work: “If my speech impediment has guided my feeling for poetry, it has also promoted the idea that our creativity comes of our pain and somehow redeems it,” he writes. “I’ve a hunger to pursue this in the most pigheaded and no doubt reductive way.”

Speech impediments don’t help or hurt the work of literary interpretation; speech impediments aren’t painful; pain is a poor source of creativity, and not the only one; not literally everything in life needs to be pathologized, the author doesn’t have a speech impediment (he sometimes has trouble with his “r”s, just as your present reviewer sometimes has trouble with his “w”s; it doesn’t make either one of us the Elephant Man), and so on, and so on.

So in this case as in so many other cases, “the problem of memoir” becomes the problem of the memoirist, and the reader is left wondering what the heck it was they just read, when the author crying “otherness” is incredibly privileged, when the author implying hardship has not only never experienced it but feels compelled to invent it for himself and others, and when even the page-by-page prose can’t justify a high school passing grade, much less a book contract? At least the “pigheaded and no doubt reductive” part tracks.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News