From essays about bra-shopping to Superbowl watching, from cooking to discussing guns and the ERA, Griffiths captures the complexity and vast identities the too-singular phrase 'woman' has come to mean.
The Sum of Her Parts isn't a screed but nor does it waver from its purpose. Writing about being a woman is difficult because being a woman is not
always difficult. And it's not always one thing.--Nicole Walker "author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh, and Navigating Disaster"
I felt Si?n Griffiths's The Sum of Her Parts on a bodily level--which makes sense, since this is a book about the body. About a woman's body, in particular--how it bends and how it breaks, the violence it incurs and the many shapes it takes. It's a book, like a body, made of both vulnerability and strength, beauty and pain, its pages coursing with love and humor and rage and desire. . . . The Sum of Her Parts is a feminist battle cry, a reclamation of our bodies as they age, as they fail us, as we rebuild and recover and redefine ourselves--as athletes, as mothers, as teachers, as lovers--and find new power in our lives. This book is an excavation, an exhumation, of womanhood and the body--naked on the page, beating and bloody and alive; a body that's built and broken into so many pieces then put back together again, creating something beautifully, powerfully whole.
--Melissa Faliveno "author of TOMBOYLAND"
Si?n Griffiths has written an important and necessary book. The Sum of Her Parts is a collection that forces our eyes open to misogyny as a disease. Griffith's essays detail how women are cleaved by the cruel language spit at us--cunt, whore, bitch--by the negative, self-sabotaging language and ideals we inflict upon ourselves and by everyday microaggressions about our bodies. This book carves itself into your arm. Here are essays like little knife wounds, and here are others in which she cooks for us. In each one she boldly asks the questions she's been told to stop asking and, in doing so, shows how women suffer a thousand tiny cuts every day, yet despite it remain warrior queens.
--Megan Culhane Galbraith "author of The Guild of the Infant Saviour: An Adopted Child's Memory Book"
Griffiths offers such fantastic insights that I felt remade in reading
The Sum of Her Parts, brought back to a body that, through similar experiences to the author, I'd been divided from. Had it been since birth? Griffiths provides a container of essays to support that inquiry.--Sonya Huber "author of Pain Woman Takes Your Keys and Other Essays from a Nervous System"