Dirtbag: Essays

Chapo Trap House podcaster Frost debuts with an irreverent and acerbic take on the contemporary American socialist movement from the inside of the “dirtbag left” (a term Frost coined). In the book’s first section, she recounts her working-class upbringing in Indiana with a single mother; part two covers her history with the Democratic Socialists of America and the Occupy Wall Street movement. In part three, Frost ascribes her support of Bernie Sanders’s 2016 and 2020 presidential campaigns to seeing “an opportunity for a righteous underdog to maybe right some of the wrongs in our country,” and links her penchant for “florid storytelling” to such influences as Hunter S. Thompson and Vivian Gornick. Throughout, Frost is cocksure in tone and style, even when she tiptoes into uncomfortable territory (she bristles at the capitalization of Black—“as if all Black people hail from Blackistan or something”). Still, she admits early on that a “book about a millennial socialist’s adventures in left politics” is “hardly reinventing the wheel,” and describes the self-doubt she felt “the moment I signed a book contract for a ‘memoir’ ”—one that was “difficult to start writing and even more difficult to finish.” While she’s often funny, intelligent company, her uncertainty lends the proceedings an air of defensiveness. This will please Frost’s admirers, but is unlikely to win over the naysayers. (Dec.)