She's Nice Though

June 1, 2022
In this hilarious collection, Mercado (Weird but Normal, 2020) explores the concept of what it's like to be a "nice girl." Raised in the Midwest, Mercado was always the one who stepped aside, prioritizing others' needs. She'd go along with whatever anyone wanted as long as no one thought ill of her. Mercado is half Filipino, and she examines the stereotype of the submissive Asian woman and how that has influenced her life. She plays with form, including essays written as lists: imagined true-crime podcasts, things that are so bad they're good, and ways she'll die because she's too nice to ask for help. "Women for Decoration" is particularly sublime, an homage to George Saunders' "The Semplica Girls," where rich people string girls from their trees as a display of wealth. Her awkward moments, such as the time she met James van der Beek of Dawson's Creek fame, are both cringey and relatable. Mercado's laugh-out-loud quarantine story will also delight readers of Phoebe Robinson's Please Don't Sit on My Bed in Your Outside Clothes (2021).

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June 13, 2022
Mercado (Weird but Normal), a blogger for The Cut, returns with another collection of humorous essays exploring her experience as an Asian woman from the Midwest. She reflects on the performativity of niceness, the dangers of agreeability, and the power dynamics of race and gender, in essays both snarky and sharp. “How to Be Nice” is a guide to kindness that advises such strategies as “giving a wedgie to everyone who asks you questions like, ‘So, where are you really from’,” while “Bad Answers to Good Questions and Vice Versa,” collects sardonic responses to matchmaking questions from the New York Times (“I’d wish for more wishes”). “Kill Them with Kindness and Other Imagined Crime Podcasts” features a list of tongue-in-cheek podcasts pitches including “How to Get Away with Murder: A series on how to turn your side hustle (murder) into a full-time gig (more murders),” and “Apologies for Men” imagines an infomercial for a product that helps men cope with messing up. Mercado maintains her self-deprecating humor while offering serious reflections on American culture, and the mix hits home, notably in “A Strange and Unprecedented Time,” an insightful take on the pandemic as told in a diarylike record of her lockdown experience. Mercado’s fans will eat this up.

July 15, 2022
A millennial humorist takes on timely topics. In her second collection of essays, following Weird But Normal, Kansas City-based writer Mercado explores a range of subjects, most notably her identity as an Asian woman in the Midwest, the conventions of lowbrow TV, the social impacts and racial dimensions of the pandemic, and the ambiguities of "niceness" as a female ideal. "So much of kindness comes down to the ability to absorb the thoughtlessness of others," she writes. The author delivers plenty of witty reflections, offering mostly casual commentary on the thickets of contemporary identity politics and the meretricious seductions of pop culture. The author is at her best when, in a distinctively quirky style, she documents her absorption as an adolescent in various TV dramas--"I attribute much of my teen horniness to Degrassi"--and assesses her conflicted status as an ambitious, attention-seeking introvert: "I don't want to be famous as evidenced by the fact that I wrote down, in a book, 'I do not want to be famous.' Nothing makes someone less famous than writing a book." At times, Mercado is unpersuasive, especially in the pieces that seem to aim at more incisive modes of cultural criticism--e.g., in her commentary on the rise of incivility in public life, the ultimate sources of racist and sexist attitudes, or the significance of her religious upbringing. Though the essential questions posed by the collection--"At the center of it all, am I actually nice or am I just performing a role I think I'm expected to play? Who is benefitting from my niceness?"--accurately locate Mercado as her own most important subject, she sometimes drifts into glib self-considerations that fail to register as anything other than light entertainment. Still, the author writes in a lively style, and she consistently expresses an appealingly irreverent sensibility. An often amusing romp through contemporary issues by a popular humorist.

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