Book Review: Erasure by Percival Everett
A Satirical Look at Identity and Success
5 min readOct 23, 2024
“Story idea” ✏️
“A woman gives birth to an egg. She goes in for a normal delivery and what comes out is an egg. A 6-pound, 3 ounce egg. The doctors don’t know what to do so they slap a diaper on it and stick it in an incubator.
Nothing happens
Then they have the mother sit on it.
Nothing happens
The egg is given to the mother to hold. She falls in love with the egg. Calls it her baby. The egg has no limbs to move, no voice with which to cry.
It is an egg and only an egg.
The woman takes the egg home, names it, bathes it, worries about it.
It is unchanging, un-growing, but it is her baby, she says. Her husband leaves, her friends don’t come over. She talks to the egg, tells her she loves it.
The egg cracks. ”
