The poet’s new book, the memoir-in-essays ‘You Get What You Pay For,’ makes the case for therapy as reparations.

by Jas Keimig

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“I am looking for something to cling to for solace amid gunfire,” author and poet Morgan Parker writes at the end of her introductory essay “Start at the Beginning” in You Get What You Pay For. “I am looking for a root, a pit at the center, something to exorcise and something to embrace.”

And over the course of 211 pages, she does just that. You Get What You Pay For is Parker’s memoir-in-essays that meditates on the intersection of Blackness and mental health in America. Through examining her own life, depression, therapy, and positioning as a Black woman in the world, Parker imagines how the psychological unburdening of Black people in America could open up our lives, our potential, and our futures.

In “Are We Not Entertainers?” she parses the cultural impact of Bill Cosby, in “George Bush Doesn’t Care About Black People” she discusses that Kanye West moment and Black grief, and in “We in the Money” she dives into the relationship between Black people and American currency. Parker’s writing is deeply intimate, darkly funny, and encapsulates an under-discussed element of the mental weight that Black folks carry from day-to-day.

Tomorrow, on March 20, Parker will join Seattle poet Jane Wong for a conversation about her new book at The Seattle Public Library. Ahead of this event, the Emerald called her up to discuss the genesis of the project, therapy as reparations, and the importance of the hyphen in “African-American.”

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This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

So setting out, what were you really interested in diving into with this project?

I really wanted to make an argument. That’s one thing that people expect from nonfiction. I don’t have a Ph.D. of any kind, but it felt important for me to talk about my mental health contextualized within the Black community and the political possibilities of therapy. I mean, that’s something obviously that we’re always hoping to do, make the personal into the political, but I really wanted to nail that down. I really wanted to articulate how my experience could be a window into other potentialities of liberation. It felt bigger than me.

I love how, also, in the first essay, “Start at the Beginning,” you meditate on what the hyphen means in “African-American.” I think it’s something that only a poet could dive into.

Language is such a big part of this book, and the effects of language. Obviously, it’s something I’m more affected by than anyone else. I really tune into each word and what it’s doing, what the history is, and why is it being used in this way? That’s something that’s always in my mind as a writer, but also feels like such an oppression and political thing that I wanted to keep coming around to. These are the things that make up a psychology, basically. I guess the whole book is kind of me as a case study, as just like a one-case study of like one African-American child — here are all the experiences and input that I’m getting, you know, and kind of just laying that out as evidence. … It’s stuff that seems obvious to me, but when we don’t really meditate on words and we’re used to hearing words and phrases, things can get lost. The book is kind of obsessed with what is the language we’re using and why? That’s a big question and I do think it’s rooted in my understanding of poetry.

In “Refrain and Refrain and Refrain: July,” you write that “I can’t accept that there is nowhere to call in case of emergency, that everywhere outside my body, I’m wished dead, too.” How do you reconcile being Black and mentally ill while living inside of a political system that targets us every day?

I will say I have a Black therapist now and a Black psychiatrist, so there’s a whole team. It has been obviously important for my mental health practitioners to know the connection and to talk about that and to acknowledge it and be like, “You’re not crazy, it is bullshit that you have to deal with this on top of this.” That has just been incredibly powerful for me and sad because of how long it took me to get there. Because I think for most of us, we’re just kind of compartmentalizing it like, “OK, I have to take care of my mental health and then I have to go outside and deal with all this bullshit.” So for me, it’s just been important to find ways that I feel validated in the confusion and frustration of that and I don’t feel like gaslit. Because I think often we as Black Americans can point out the situations that we’re in and how frustrating they are. Why am I paying taxes for these cops, I’m never gonna call them — you know what I mean? Like just the absurdity of it all, but there’s really nowhere to put that, you know, except for maybe sometimes on each other — and there’s no healing toward that. So for me, it’s just been important to honor that in my mental health journey and make space to talk about it. With the book, I think it has been just important for me and other Black people to be like, this is real, this is really going on, this is some real bullshit, and just to be able to say it’s not fair.

“I really wanted to articulate how my experience could be a window into other potentialities of liberation.”

Jumping off that, I really loved your final essay “Cheaper than Therapy” where you make the case for therapy as reparations. Can you talk a little bit about your thinking behind that concept?

It really started from, first me having this white therapist who made me explain Ferguson to her, which is crazy. I was like, I should be paid for that. Then I was thinking, how many hours have I lost? You know, because I would leave these sessions being like we still never talked about how I’m supposed to get a date. [laughs] Like what the fuck? So thinking about how much money I have spent in therapy — which I’m paying to heal myself and move myself forward in my life — but I can’t because I’m in there talking about how cops want to kill Black people. That’s crazy. That feels like I should be reimbursed. If I’m going to spend all this money in therapy, I’m not going to pay to talk about your problems.

Then thinking about all the ways that therapy over time has allowed me to remove some of the responsibility that I internalized about my own mental health. There’s a lot of stuff I thought was my fault and I hate myself and blah, blah, blah. But I came to find it was very rooted in white supremacy and the white supremacist psychology that I internalized. So noticing that was a weight lifted. I mean, it’s still something I have to stop — I like to say to myself, “I hate myself” and I know it’s not me. I know that now. But it’s still a daily practice because we’re fed and born into a psychology, and we internalize it. … So I think it really was impactful for me to notice how much of my suffering was rooted outside of myself. And just not about my diagnosis, not, it’s not gonna be solved with, “Let’s up the lamotrigine.” That wasn’t gonna do it.

Then that led me to thinking about like, holy fuck, how many of us are suffering, diagnosed or undiagnosed? How many of us are robbing banks? How is this making us sick? For me, it has manifested as mental illness, but for other people, it can manifest in addiction, in self-hatred, and violence. So that really led me into thinking, wow if we were healed psychologically from some of this that we are all placing on ourselves in different kinds of ways, what would happen? What could happen? For me it was a really powerful idea of like, shit, if we had psychological liberation — obviously I’ll take some money — but l do think that I could much easier make the money if I were free of mind. You know what I mean? And Kanye is an example that I give — look at all the stuff we’ve made while we’re ill. We have suffered and still made incredible work. It is astounding to think what we could make if we weren’t battling these things internally.

What does it mean to get what you pay for? I was so intrigued by the title of this project.

It was kind of a weird title to come up with. I wanted it to work on a lot of different levels. The first is like the darkly funny part is like — slaves. You get what you pay for! Y’all bought us, don’t be complaining that we’re here! [laughs] But then also pointing back to this idea of, who’s paying for what and what’s the quality of the mental health care that I’m paying for? Pointing back to that white therapist, pointing back to if our therapy were paid for via reparations, what could be gotten from that? The other side of that is my assumption that we probably won’t get that because it’s expensive and because it would ruin a lot of other industries. So many things would start to crumble and so there’s a little bit of like how is money being used and who’s deciding? I also wanted it to be something that was a familiar phrase but used differently. Something that people maybe have heard but have to stop and think about what it means or could mean in this project.

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Morgan Parker is chatting about her memoir-in-essays, “You Get What You Pay For,” with Seattle poet Jane Wong at the Central Library on March 20 at 7 p.m. Register online.

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📸 Featured Image: Poet and writer Morgan Parker will be in conversation with poet Jane Wong about her memoir-in-essays “You Get What You Pay For” tomorrow, March 20, at The Seattle Public Library. (Photo: James Michael Juarez )

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