When I think of memoirs, I typically think of them as intimate re-tellings of an author's life. They may not follow the author's story from childhood all the way into adulthood and instead choose to focus on a particular important period in their life, but they typically offer a clear narrative structure that goes from beginning to end. Avashia's Another Appalachia distinguishes itself from this typical structure. The book is more of a collection of short essays about her life than it is a complete memoir that flows chronologically and coherently from her youth to the present. Still, Another Appalachia is a beautiful memoir. Avashia's writing is incredible. She is clearly someone who cherishes the people and things in her life and thinks deeply about them. Her writing has an ability to convey the emotion of an experience so completely and enable the reader to begin to experience those emotions alongside her, whether it was an experience we were familiar with or not. There were elements of her story I personally related to (outgrowing your conservative hometown, trying to reconcile receiving love from someone who expressly hates a key part of your identity, leaving the countryside and trying to settle in Boston where people can feel so different than where we were raised) but even the elements new to me struck me deeply. The image I remember most from the book is a young Avashia admiring the women in her extended network of Indolachians dance as they celebrated Navratri. The clarity and reverence with which she described each woman as she danced was so beautiful, it made me emotional reading it. I really enjoyed this book and truly loved each essay Avashia wrote. However, because I enjoyed them so thoroughly, I couldn't help but wish the blanks between them had been filled. I left the book yearning for the more traditional memoir format I was used to, where I was granted a more deep view into the author's story. In particular, I wanted to read more about Avashia's experience growing up queer in Appalachia. Most of Avashia's "coming out" is brushed aside as a series of first dates that went nowhere until suddenly in her early thirties she was able to let go of this idea of who her life partner should be (a southern, Indian man) and open herself up to her current partner (a white Jewish woman) Perhaps this information was just too personal to share, but I really wanted to know more about what happened in those in between years before she met her current partner and realized she could let go of what sounds like compulsory heterosexuality.