Heather Havrilesky

An uneven collection. The writing is always good - slightly showy, well-constructed, and honest. But this often masks ideas that don't seem that well thought out, or that are trivial.

For example, Havrilesky argues that "sitting at the bedside, holding the dying [spouse's] hand" is romantic. There are a million movies with this scene, but she is arguing as if this is a unique and brave argument that she is making.

In another essay, analysing the 2016 election, she asks, "[d]id the passivity of our screen-led lives slowly transform us into nihilists without our noticing?" As a throwaway observation, sure, maybe. As an explanation for the election of Donald Trump, I'd have to put it pretty far down the list.

There's a cluster of more personal essays at the end that are the strongest in the collection. Here the prose style suits the content very well, and Havrilesky is in her comfort zone.… (meer)

I found it deeply moving. Contrary to the impressions a reader might get from the two excerpts that have been published (both of which have been branded as essays about how the writer hates her husband), it's actually more about her gratitude for and appreciation of her husband. I would almost go so far as to say it's a paean to her husband. However, I don't really think it's strictly a marriage memoir at all. It's a story about one person in a family, with needs and desires, trying to reconcile the urges of her self with her responsibilities toward the people she has bonded herself to.

Yes, it's snarky and hilarious, and yes, that's what initially drew me to it. But my reading experience quickly became an act of self-comfort. The author does not hesitate to disclose personal humiliations, weird secrets, and the like, in the service of honestly exploring what it is like to choose to have a family, when you are a woman and when you may be a teeny bit ambivalent about the personal and cultural baggage that goes along with that.

I love her metaphors. Most memorable for me are from the chapter "Aging Viciously," about a couple male "friends" who tell her, within a year of her having her first kid, that she used to be hot but now is almost unrecognizably frumpy looking. One of these men she describes as a grouper: "He fixes me with one fish eye stuck in the side of his head like a Picasso painting and tells me ... His gills hiss and spit out seawater as he laughs, spattering my dress with little bits of seaweed and foam from the tides." The other one is a raccoon: "he scratches furiously behind one of his pointy ears with a gnarled claw.....the angry animal's bloodshot eyes narrow as he laps up his drink greedily, using both of his little raccoon hands."

Read the book if you've ever had a bad relationship, a good relationship, felt like you were losing yourself in all of your responsibilities to others, experienced misogyny, if you've ever wanted but not wanted something, if you have found yourself trapped in a life that isn't "you," or if you want to feel better about being an imperfect human trying your best along with other imperfect humans.… (meer)