Page Turners: ‘I Want To Burn This Place Down’ by Maris Kreizman

Every month, we’re going to bring you a conversation about a book we’re intrigued by, and which, we humbly suggest, you might be intrigued by as well.

This month, that book is “I Want To Burn This Place Down,” a collection of personal essays by Brooklyn writer Maris Kreizman.

Deborah Sussman, senior director of marketing and communications at Arizona State University’s Herberger Institute — and a personal essayist in her own right — spoke about the collection with The Show.

Amber Victoria Singer/KJZZ

Full conversation

SAM DINGMAN: To start, I thought we could share an excerpt from the book. The book, as I said, is a collection of essays, but there is a sort of central idea that runs through all of them, which is Maris’ experience with living with chronic diabetes and how that makes her think about structural issues in the United States.

DEBORAH SUSSMAN: Absolutely. And so this particular passage comes in an essay where she talks about meeting her, the man she would marry and realizing that from that she gets health insurance.

“That health insurance is tied to finding love is just as cruel and absurd as tying it to your profession. A hard won lesson that took me longer to learn than I'd like to admit. There's so many things we can't control, no matter how hard we might try. No one's health should suffer for that.”

“Imagine if all the morsels of advice that were flung at me as a single woman applied to not only the mysteries of human connection, but access to basic human necessities. It really changes the tenor of the discourse, doesn't it? Dating like it's your job just so you can get that prescription filled. Learning to love yourself so you can see that specialist. Wearing a date night top that is the perfect blend of sexy and sophisticated so you can get that MRI.”

“These feel like terrible pitches for dystopian reality shows. Back off, TLC. Rather than sound strategies for taking care of one's health and well-being. Although I suppose living with a chronic illness in America has always been something of a dystopian reality show.”

DINGMAN: Yeah, that button line, I think really drives home a lot of what Maris is going after with this collection of essays, and I'm curious to know what you felt about this, Deborah, but for me, one of the things that was remarkable about reading this book was that I don't think I had ever really read a personal account in such great detail of what it's like to deal with having a chronic condition and the practical ways that that forms the entirety of your life.

There's one passage in particular where Maris talks about going out with her husband, Josh, for an anniversary dinner. So hard to get reservations at this restaurant. This is a night that they've been craving for a long time.

SUSSMAN: Yeah, it's their anniversary.

DINGMAN: It's their anniversary, and with every bite of food she takes, she has to then quickly look at her phone to check her glucose monitor to make sure that it's not throwing her out of whack. So it's, it's like she's having the experience, but she can't be fully in the experience.

SUSSMAN: And not only can she not be in it, and this is what she's so good at. She helps you understand how little control she has over it. There's this sort of idea that if you have a chronic illness, there's some personal responsibility for how well you're doing.

And as she walks you through that particular meal, you understand just how little anything that she is doing because she's trying to do everything right is affecting her numbers, and her numbers are rising.

DINGMAN: Yeah, there's another passage that I wanted to share quickly that I think gets at this, where she says:

“I'm always wondering if what I feel is normal, if there is such a thing, if I'm so exhausted at the end of a hot day that I must cancel my plans to sit in front of my air conditioner and drink Gatorade Zero. Is that what regular non-diabetic people feel like, too? Has the heat become more physically taxing for everyone, or is it because heat interferes so thoroughly with my diabetes that what I'm experiencing is particular to me? Or is it all of the above plus the planet is literally on fire, and what does normal feel like anyway?”

SUSSMAN: That's, she does that so beautifully, right? Takes her personal situation and puts it in context. And this passage in particular really struck me, full disclosure, i read the book and then I listened to it with my daughter who's 27 and has a sort of chronic autoinflammatory disorder, and that was the passage where my daughter like started snapping. It was just the whole idea of “What is normal?

Right? And how do I know what's normal and always questioning whether something weird is going on with your body. I think my daughter found this book incredibly validating.

DINGMAN: Well, this brings me to something, Deborah, that I felt was less successful in the book, and I'd be curious to get your take on this because this quality of gradual realization that the world does not work the way you have been taught as a child, it perhaps should, is so compelling in the sections that we've been talking about.

But there's another section where Maris writes about realizing that some of the propaganda about cops as good guys, that she has ingested from shows like “Miami Vice” and “Brooklyn 99,” she's coming to question those feelings.

SUSSMAN: The “copaganda.”

DINGMAN: The copaganda, yes. The chapter I think is called “Copaganda and Me.” And there's a moment where she reveals that she has two twin brothers, both of whom are police officers, and I had this great hope, as she revealed that, that this was going to lead into a conversation between her and her brothers about their experiences as cops, so she could try to bridge this gap a little bit.

But that conversation never happens, and I felt such a letdown at that moment because it felt like a betrayal of this sense of curiosity that had been cultivated up to that point. What did you think of that moment?

SUSSMAN: That's interesting. I, I felt like it was almost an unbridgeable gap. That one of the things she talks about in the essay is how scrupulously she has to avoid discussing this stuff with her brothers because they have kind of gone down a rabbit hole, and they, the media that they consume, kind of the way they see the world is so fundamentally different from, from her way of seeing everything, her way of being in the world.

And I think we talk a lot about the divide in American society right now. And to me, it felt like that was emblematic of the fact that some families can only continue to get along if they don't talk about this stuff.

DINGMAN: Right, right. True, true. Well, and this gets to the title of the book. “I Want To Burn This Place Down.” And Maris writes throughout the book about how in many ways this is the story of her radicalization, her arriving at the conclusion that not only does she disagree with many conservative viewpoints, almost all, but mainline Democratic views no longer seem to suit her, and she feels like there's there's this need for structural revolution to the system. 

Did you feel, well, how did you feel about her, her attempt to express that? I'm tipping my hand. 

SUSSMAN: Tip away. So part of what I loved about this book is it, is so much Maris's voice. It is, you know, she seems like a really smart, interesting person who is trying to piece it all together, and her way of processing it all may not be mine, but I, there were many things that echoed for me, and so what I, what I love is reading those essays, has changed the way I see the world a little bit.

It hasn't necessarily changed the way I think about the world, but I see echoes of what she talks about in, you know, for example, “Brooklyn 99,” which is a show that my daughter and I watch. It's a thing that we had been talking about anyway, but to, to read it through her, you know, eyes is, is sort of astonishing from the vantage point of somebody who has two brothers who became police officers.

DINGMAN: Yeah. Well, as Maris puts it, pardon me, in the book: “There is comfort in other people's stories to learn that I am not the only one aching to move past my own petty concerns.”

So we'll leave you with that intriguing line.