Raw and unfiltered

I like reading memoirs because people’s stories are fascinating. I want to read about people’s journey, their struggles, their lives. I want to know everything about a person. I was an instant fan of Jonathan Van Ness. On Queer Eye he was unpretentious, original, and promoted self-care as feeling good about yourself, rather than conforming to societal standards of beauty and performative forms of self-care. So I was excited to finally sit down and read JVN’s memoir, Over The Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love.

Over The Top: A Raw Journey to Self-Love is Jonathan Van Ness’s memoir. He lays himself bare, not shying away from the tougher parts of his life, and the battles he had to face in order to get where he is now. JVN’s journey to self-love was not simple. There were plenty of experiences in his life, from sexual abuse to addiction, that made him negligent about taking care of himself. When societal stigma makes you think that you’re at fault, and that you are the problem, unlearning those behaviours takes time and effort. Jonathan takes us along his journey, from being a young boy who wanted to be a cosmetologist to becoming the phenomenon that he is.

The story itself is inspiring. Without big declarations and cheesy motivational quotes, Jonathan’s story felt real and resonated with me. I was happy to learn about Jonathan’s life, and to understand the struggles of growing up as a queer person in America. I didn’t need the story to be a fable or a fairy tale, for every chapter to have an overarching lesson, and the book doesn’t do that. As the subtitle says, it is a raw journey to self-love.

However, Jonathan isn’t a fantastic writer. This memoir was not as powerful as Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou, or as lyrical as Educated by Tara Westover. Jonathan is a performer, so listening to this book as audio is a better experience than reading it. His unique way of speaking is what gives this book character, something that doesn’t translate well into text. Text and audio are different media and need to be handled differently. Over The Top seemed to have audio in mind, over text. 

Yet, the book was well paced and well structured. Memoirs can be tough because not only are they dealing with often painful experiences in a person’s life, they also need to keep in mind the reader. Readers may not want to know about every meal the person ate, or every little interesting event in their life. Over The Top doesn’t do that. It keeps in mind the message of the book, and tells us everything we need to know to feel like we understand Jonathan’s journey. It was a delightful read for a fan and a memoir junkie.

A note on the illustration: this illustration was hard for me to do because I’m not good at drawing men or at dark watercolor paintings. Yet it was a lesson in patience and starting from scratch over and over again.