REVIEW : GREEDY / JEN WINSTON
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Greedy:
Notes from a Bisexual
Who Wants Too Much
Jen Winston
Atria Books
Review by
Krista Varela Posell
When I came across Jen Winston’s Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much, I thought yes, this is the book I’ve been waiting for. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, Winston examines the lifelong process of embracing oneself as a bisexual in a world that continually denies its presence. “Bi culture is everything. Which means bi culture is nothing,” she writes in the opening essay, “As annoying as this logic loop might be, it reflects exactly what it’s like to be bisexual: to be told simultaneously that you are asking for too much and also that you don’t exist.” I underlined and starred this paragraph, feeling seen by the acknowledgment that bi folks often aren’t seen at all, and found myself charging ahead to see what other gems of truth there were to excavate.
Winston covers a wide range of topics documenting what feel like stereotypical bisexual experiences, from fumbling through a first queer sexual encounter, to serving as a unicorn in a threesome. But these aren’t just straightforward essays about sexuality; the book experiments with style and form in several ways. Early on, an essay about Winston’s first teenage girl infatuation is written like a medical case study, complete with third-person observations and a clinical diagnosis of Benign Girl Crush. Another essay, “Bisexuality in Men: A Retrospective,” is entirely told through back-and-forth email exchanges with an ex-boyfriend. Scenes in other essays are written as screenplay. This playfulness reflects Winston’s struggle to have to continually reinvent and reaffirm herself, of constantly trying on different hats to find one with the right fit, keeping the reader engaged and invested in the journey.
I could relate to much of the hand-wringing and imposter syndrome that Winston describes as she navigates coming to terms with her own queerness. The voice in Greedy is humorous, often to the point of being self-deprecating. This lands most of the time, though occasionally I wanted to reach through the page and tell Winston (and by extension, my baby queer self) to just cut herself some slack. But the book’s not all jokes and self-ridicule; she strikes a delicate balance of sincerity where it’s called for. In “The Neon Sweater,” Winston recounts a poignant experience of sexual assault situated against the backdrop of 45’s presidency and the #MeToo movement. She doesn’t shy away from discussing trauma—her own, and those of the bisexual community at large; acknowledging that bi women have increased rates of substance abuse and sexual assault, she writes, “our traumas will help us trust that we are, in fact, bi.”
Winston’s experiences are very millennial, and indeed, she is just a few years older than I am. The book is chalk-full of pop culture references–from her frequent use of textspeak to imagining how the characters from Sex and the City would have voted in the 2020 election–and she cites many of her references by their Instagram or Twitter handles. But she also grounds her writing in the work of experts at times; one of the more endearing essays for me was “True Life: I Masturbate Wrong,” where she uses disability theory to embrace her own unique methods of self-pleasuring that don’t conform to the standards of the male gaze.
Greedy is an essay collection that covers a lot of ground, clocking in at over 300 pages, and I found myself asking, is it trying to cover too much? I was most compelled by the last quarter of the book—which details Winston’s first long-term queer relationship and her questioning of her own gender identity—and wished more room had been left for the lines of inquiry she opens within it. But this is sort of the point: as bisexuals, we have to cram in as much as we can if given the platform because when else might we get the chance? There’s plenty to love and relate to in Greedy: from the form to the content, Winston engages several important conversations on not only bisexuality, but on desire and belonging as a whole.
Greedy: Notes from a Bisexual Who Wants Too Much by Jen Winston is out now from Atria Books.
Krista Varela Posell is a greedy bisexual living in San Francisco.
