An NPR Best Book of 2021
“Moore infuses this memoir with keenly researched insights about the historical forces that created Detroit’s (and America’s) housing crisis, creating a heartfelt, funny, thought-provoking meditation on the multifaceted fallacy of the American Dream.” —Booklist (starred review)
“Original, funny, and brilliant, this book outmaneuvers, outshines, and will outlive so many memoirs that seek to cover the same tenuous ground.” —Orion Magazine
“Through a series of darkly comic vignettes with epigraphs from Woolf’s essay framing each chapter, [Moore] uncovers the city’s incompetent governance. Municipal services cannot be relied upon to function; the school system cannot be relied upon to teach children to read. Greed and cruelty drive water shutoffs that ‘target poor communities of color but ignore corporations owing millions.’ More than a quarter of residents lose their homes to property tax foreclosure. But Moore’s project here is not just to illuminate the city’s chaos and who profits from it. Gentrifier is also an investigation of the costs — monetary, psychological, ethical — of her free house, and an ode to the neighbors who gave her life there inflections of joy.” —NPR
“Intriguing.” —Daily Kos
“Incisive. . . . A trenchant meditation on how communities come together, and the forces that drive them apart.” —Publishers Weekly
“Both comedic and fierce. . . . A different kind of memoir.” —Library Journal
“Eye-opening . . . A unique, lovely meditation on the power of community.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“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.” — Off the Beaten Shelf
“Funny, tender, rigorous, and alive, Anne Elizabeth Moore’s Gentrifier is the best book I’ve read on this freighted subject, and so much more. Along the way, you learn a lot about about the wonders and complexities of one particular neighborhood in Detroit, but in turn your own community—what you’ve overlooked, and all you want to make better. A tour de force by a writer who is smart enough to let activism and absurdity sit side by side, and let them go. I’m in awe.” —Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
“Gentrifier is a fascinating read: a writer’s dream comes true and she is given a house of her own, a house to write in, but things do not go as planned. Anne Elizabeth Moore is a superb and compassionate writer; this is a sweet, difficult, excellent book.” —Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveller’s Wife
“Gentrifier is an indictment of institutionalized racism, xenophobia, and greed—in both public and private spheres. But the heart of the book lies with Moore’s personal story, told with warmth and self-deprecating wit, breezy and deep in turn.” —Abeer Hoque, author of Olive Witch
“Anne Elizabeth Moore is one of our great chroniclers of the collisions between the personal and the political. A contemporary A Room of One’s Own, Gentrifier interrogates the relationships between class, race, gender, religion, sexuality, economics, love, community, and the medical industrial complex, all through the lens of Moore’s experience of being given a ‘free’ house in Detroit. This story of a house, a city, and what it means to be a woman on one’s own illuminates the utterly compelling complexities that lie beneath the veneer of what outsiders can glimpse in this one of a kind American city. Moore offers a window through which we can deeply examine the beauties, booby-traps, and at times Kafkaesque logistics of what it means to be an artist in the contemporary Midwestern landscape.” —Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down
“With wry humor and uncommon insight, Anne Elizabeth Moore crafts an intimate portrait of self-determination and communal possibility in a resilient Detroit neighborhood. Yes, this book is about gentrification, but it is also about neighborhood sustainability, government corruption, nonprofit hypocrisy, chronic illness, gardening, girlhood, family, racism, education, misogyny, autonomy, queer striving, a writer’s life, and the elusive and ever-present search for home.” —Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, author of The Freezer Door
“Anne Elizabeth Moore’s writing pulls no punches, rolls up its sleeves, and digs into difficulty with grace and aplomb. Gentrifier is a beautiful, complicated ode to a city, to creativity, and to community. It is funny, it is devastating, it is insightful. It is a tremendous call for change. I would read anything Moore writes—including her grocery list—and happily. Read this.” —Kayla Rae Whitaker, author of The Animators
“This kaleidoscopic page-turner chronicles the absurdities and hard-won joys of existing in a body, a household, a community, and a country. I don’t know how Anne managed to write the funniest book I’ve read in years and the most honest one about the scramble of American life, but she did, and we are the better for it.” —Jace Clayton, author of Uproot: Travels in 21st-Century Music and Digital Culture
Order from Catapult Books here.
Read a follow-up to the book at The Guardian here.
Interview with Alissa Quart at WORD Bookstores about the Guardian piece, the backlash, and the book.
Read an excerpt at LitHub here.
Interview with The Feminist Agenda.
Interview with SAIC’s Art Connects Us.
Interview with Always With A Book.
Video from the Exile in Bookville event with Anjulie Rao.
Video from the Literati event with Casey Rocheteau.
Video from the Quimby’s event with Liz Mason and Cynthia Hanifin.
Video from the Third Place Books event with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore.
Read about the cover design process here.
The Daily Kos nonfiction roundup.