Eternity Martis opens up her memoir, They Said This Would Be Fun: Race, Campus Life and Growing Up with an experience that almost every student out of high-school looks forward to: Frosh Week.
However, as one of the few Black students on Western University’s campus, she quickly realizes that her university experience doesn’t match what she has seen in the movies.
In her national best-seller, Martis illuminates “the not-so-secret lives of university students: the messy, the complicated, exciting but harrowing experience of what it’s like to be a student and woman of colour today.”
She talks about her four years at Western being confronted by white students wearing blackface at parties, being the only person of colour in class and being tokenized by her romantic partners.
Martis also discusses being raised by her Irish and Pakistani mother in Toronto. She reflects on her absent Jamaican father and how she felt little connection to that part of herself. She also talks about how her South Asian family would avoid discussing her Jamaican identity.
All of these experiences connect to the memoir’s over-arching themes of self-discovery, systems of oppression and the complexity of relationships.
They Said This Would Be Fun is one of those books you can’t stop thinking about once you finish it. It validates so many experiences that university students go through.
One of the most compelling parts of the memoir is how relatable it is. Dealing with bad roommates, navigating changing friendships and being in a toxic relationship are just some of the experiences many university students can relate to in this book.
The memoir normalizes the growing pains of your late teens to early twenties and emphasizes gaining hope through finding a supportive community.
If you’re looking for a book to help you make sense of your university experience, a read to relate to, or even just a story to learn from, you’ll definitely want to grab They Said This Would Be Fun.