Gentrifier: A Memoir

In 2016, a Detroit arts organization grants writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house--a room of her own, áa la Virginia Woolf--in Detroit's majority-Bangladeshi "Banglatown." Within months, her life changes dramatically, as told in this hilarious and gutting memoir. Accompanied by her cats, Anne Elizabeth Moore moves to a bungalow in a new city where she gardens, befriends the neighborhood youth, and grows to intimately understand civic collapse and community solidarity. When the troubled history of her prize house comes to light, Moore finds her life destabilized by the aftershocks of the housing crisis and governmental corruption. This is a memoir of art, gender, work, and survival. Moore writes into the gaps of Woolf's declaration that "a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write"; what if this woman were queer and living with chronic illness, as Moore is, or a South Asian immigrant, like Moore's neighbors? And what if her primary coping mechanism were jokes? Part investigation, part comedy of a vexing city, and part love letter to girlhood, Gentrifier examines capitalism, property ownership, and whiteness, asking if we can ever really win when violence and profit are inextricable linked with victory.