She’s Nice Though: Essays on Being Bad at Being Good

Mercado (Weird but Normal), a blogger for The Cut, returns with another collection of humorous essays exploring her experience as an Asian woman from the Midwest. She reflects on the performativity of niceness, the dangers of agreeability, and the power dynamics of race and gender, in essays both snarky and sharp. “How to Be Nice” is a guide to kindness that advises such strategies as “giving a wedgie to everyone who asks you questions like, ‘So, where are you really from’,” while “Bad Answers to Good Questions and Vice Versa,” collects sardonic responses to matchmaking questions from the New York Times (“I’d wish for more wishes”). “Kill Them with Kindness and Other Imagined Crime Podcasts” features a list of tongue-in-cheek podcasts pitches including “How to Get Away with Murder: A series on how to turn your side hustle (murder) into a full-time gig (more murders),” and “Apologies for Men” imagines an infomercial for a product that helps men cope with messing up. Mercado maintains her self-deprecating humor while offering serious reflections on American culture, and the mix hits home, notably in “A Strange and Unprecedented Time,” an insightful take on the pandemic as told in a diarylike record of her lockdown experience. Mercado’s fans will eat this up. (Aug.)