Michael Milburn

I should confess right upfront that the only reason I went looking for this book is because Milburn is Mary Karr's ex, and I wanted to read something from his viewpoint after encountering him in her memoirs. My motives were not pure. That being said, Milburn is a good writer, but he inhabits a world so alien to my own that it's almost as if he's writing in a different language. WASP privilege infuses every word he writes, and it's really hard for me to like him. I think he's achingly sincere, never more so than when he writes about his love of teaching adolescents English, but he's unconsciously patronizing in a way I'm all too familiar with.… (meer)