(pdf e-book)
Who is Abeba? And Do You Hate Her?

Who is Abeba? And Do You Hate Her? Autism, Abortion, Climate, COVID, Race, Brexit, Partisanship, Gender, Wokeism, and Russia…vs. Erotic Yearning.

Abeba is a young, autistic woman originally from an Ethiopian community in the American Midwest, who now lives in Oxford, England, and who is trying to make it as a documentary filmmaker. The book begins right after a relief effort she documented in post-civil war Sierra Leone. She has clearly fallen head over heels in love with a London man named Danny—who is of an undetermined physical description, race, and economic status—and who worked for that humanitarian mission. Danny, however, is in the midst of negotiating a separation from his current wife, a breakup that is complicated by a child.

Abeba’s erotically desperate, starved, and dysregulated emails to Danny take up over half the book.

But interspersed between these eight chapters of Abeba’s close to one hundred emails (Danny only has two), are seven chapters that have nothing to do with Abeba and Danny’s love story. All seven tackle a controversial subject such as racism, abortion…etc. And pooled together, these secondary seven chapters oddly do not seem to share a value system.

Also, all seven side chapters are written in a different literary style (young adult, romance, haiku, horror, magic realism, suspense…),and a children’s book chapter, “How to Become a Good Young Person” is jarring not because it’s so heartachingly beautiful, but because it spares no demographic in its insinuations of who is NOT a “good young person.”

The characters in these chapters come from Mexico, Russia, outer space, Oxford, South Asia…

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“Who is Abeba…?” is being appropriately categorized by Neurodiversity Press as “Fiction.” But those emails Abeba writes…we know they’re real. We know it,-and you’ll know it. They came from life, from whoever “Abeba” really is, because you just can’t make up that kind of erotic desperation.

But the side chapters are products of a vivid and radiantly passionate imagination that is sick to death of the arguments of our world. So this is Fiction. Brilliant, inventive, playful, and deep Fiction; that in the end pointedly pits biological destiny against culturally- or environmentally-created values.