I went into this book expecting to like it, but man, it really left me reeling emotionally. I had read one of the essays in the book before I started it, a piece about growing up in Houston and attending a megachurch and the connection between the divine and the euphoria of club drug use, and it was extremely good and well written, but it also didn't feel all that relatable to my personal experience. It was a window into someone else's life, which I enjoyed, but was also able to maintain an emotional distance from. And boy was that not the case of every essay in this book!
The first one, about how we exist online and how that affects basically everything, was disconcertingly relevant to my experience, in part because it reflects the experience of the internet and blogs and even twitter as being something that for me, personally, I still consider to be a net positive, even as I view it as a net negative for basically everyone as a whole. That contradiction is basically impossible to resolve, and the essay doesn't try to, or at least doesn't succeed, but it's such a familiar exploration, only about ten times as insightful as I usually feel when I'm arguing with myself in the shower.
The essay that punched me in the face, though, was the one about why the best heroines in novels are always girls, or at most, on the very cusp of womanhood. It was such a familiar and wrenching look at what is possible fictionally for (white, straight) girls, and what immediately becomes impossible as soon as they're old enough to be married and become mothers. The thruline from that essay to her piece on women's constant optimization, via the right salad and the right exercise and clean living rather than dieting, continues on through a piece on me too and straight through until the end, in a piece on wedding culture that I thought wouldn't affect me nearly as much as it did. I don't know. Each individual essay is worth reading, but it truly is greater as a whole, because each piece feeds into the next one and reflects back what you were thinking about an essay you had read two hours prior.
There's a feeling of constantly, desperately trying to explain where we are and why as a culture, like if we can only articulate it well enough we can fix it, and I don't actually believe that anymore, but the relief of reading someone else's brilliant efforts at the same task made me want to believe in it again.
Grade: A
The first one, about how we exist online and how that affects basically everything, was disconcertingly relevant to my experience, in part because it reflects the experience of the internet and blogs and even twitter as being something that for me, personally, I still consider to be a net positive, even as I view it as a net negative for basically everyone as a whole. That contradiction is basically impossible to resolve, and the essay doesn't try to, or at least doesn't succeed, but it's such a familiar exploration, only about ten times as insightful as I usually feel when I'm arguing with myself in the shower.
The essay that punched me in the face, though, was the one about why the best heroines in novels are always girls, or at most, on the very cusp of womanhood. It was such a familiar and wrenching look at what is possible fictionally for (white, straight) girls, and what immediately becomes impossible as soon as they're old enough to be married and become mothers. The thruline from that essay to her piece on women's constant optimization, via the right salad and the right exercise and clean living rather than dieting, continues on through a piece on me too and straight through until the end, in a piece on wedding culture that I thought wouldn't affect me nearly as much as it did. I don't know. Each individual essay is worth reading, but it truly is greater as a whole, because each piece feeds into the next one and reflects back what you were thinking about an essay you had read two hours prior.
There's a feeling of constantly, desperately trying to explain where we are and why as a culture, like if we can only articulate it well enough we can fix it, and I don't actually believe that anymore, but the relief of reading someone else's brilliant efforts at the same task made me want to believe in it again.
Grade: A
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