Brittney Griner

As a 74-year-old white guy, I guess I couldn’t be any more different from Brittney Griner than I am. So what drew me to her memoir? I think I wanted to know why. Why she had the cannabis in her bag. Why she was so careless. Why she allowed herself to be put in that situation. It wasn’t far into the book when I had all of my answers. And any idea I had that she was just another entitled professional athlete who felt the rules were meant for everyone else but not her went out the window. I show more fully understood how her arrest could have happened to anyone. As I got into the book and all of that was answered, I was able to see who Brittney Griner is. And when I watch her play now, I see an individual with depth and sensitivity. And it breaks my heart when I hear her say that she constantly has to put up with idiots asking, “What is she, a man?” My only criticism of the book is the drastic difference in style from Brittney’s writing and her ghost writer’s style of writing. I found that distracting. That said, unlike many co-written celebrity memoirs, this one made no attempt to hide the fact that there was a professional writer writing along with Brittney, and that I appreciated. show less

I listened to the audiobook from Libro.fm. A moving memoir, beautifully crafted by the co-author Michelle Burford.

This year I have spent a lot of time in Russian prisons, first with Alexei Navalny and now with Brittney Griner.

She doesn't come off as an ignorant American. Before her detainment, she had played for 8 years in Russia, so she did know something. However, somewhere in the book she expresses an idea that a country should be judged by its prisons and during her 10 months there she show more had a chance to get to know Putin's Russia intimately, which she summarizes in one sentence:

“Russia stripped me of my humanity.”

The Russian-style Kafkian courts are also perfectly summarized in Brittney's memoir:

“The name of the game was enduring the charade as a way to minimize the sentence.”

Unfortunately, since her book came out, her country has changed a lot and these words are painful to read:

“I take pride in being American, especially after being imprisoned in a country where public dissent can get you killed. Here, freedom of speech is our right. Exercising that right makes me more of an American, not less. Sit, stand, kneel, protest. The beauty of our homeland is that we have a choice.”

She advocates for more equal pay in women basketball (the salaries in WNBA are like 15 times lower than in NBA, which was the reason she also played in Russia and China), black rights, women rights, LGTBQ+ rights because she has first hand experienced it all being a queer, black, tall woman with a flat chest and masculine voice. Finally, she has become a flag woman of the Bring Our Families Home (BOFH) movement to bring all wrongfully detained American hostages home. show less

nonfiction/memoir - Olympic champion basketball star is targeted by "customs" as a foreign traveler after a routine flight into Russia (playing internationally pays a lot better than her measly capped salary with the WNBA) and is detained indefinitely when a search of her bags turns up a minuscule amount of CBD oil in two forgotten, used up vape pens.

Very readable, compelling story. BG is so likeable--she just wants to get back home to her wife and family--and the broken, decrepit cogs of show more Russia's dystopian "justice" system are truly a nightmare on so many levels. show less

In 2022 professional basketball player Brittany Griner was detained in Russia on trumped-up drug charges; here she tells the story of her life with a focus on her imprisonment and its aftermath. Her description of the time she spent in the remains of the Gulag is intriguing, but I found her narrative voice inconsistent and her love for her partner oversold. Ok, but not a favorite.