“She’s Nice Though” - Mia Mercado

 🍭 I enjoyed this one so much! I listened to it as an audiobook, and was enthusiastically nodding along within moments. SNT is a collection of essays and a couple of short stories revolving around the theme of putting on a social performance of being nice. Mercado is humorous, honest, and so very relatable.

🍭 As an Asian-American woman, and former elementary school Miss Manners title holder (ahem, I’m kind of a big deal), Mercado’s musings on the motivations for being nice struck a chord with me. Throughout my childhood, and even occasionally as an adult (though law school helped evacuate some of these feelings), I felt very strongly that politeness was expected out of me; that I had to constantly prove my right to occupy space but taking up as little as possible.

🍭 Mercado uses her life experiences as a Filipina-American woman growing up in the Midwest, the dichotomy between social expectations of  “normies” and celebrities, as well as her own innovations such as the Little Miss Shithead character (who, by the way, is *sorely* needed in the Little Miss/Mr. Men universe), to return to the idea of niceties. Are we intrinsically nice or performing an act of niceness because society expects it of us?