A 58 year-old slightly unhinged woman as a slightly pretentious college professor fixating, dangerously, on a younger man, should have really been my bag. Especially with the prose styling in the first half of this book. But it actually decidedly continues to subvert the expectations of this reader—by continually navigating to the uninteresting because it thinks that’s fun in a meta way. But it’s actually just… uninteresting. Hot take, I know.

This book is a three star read, I _might_ have said (this is a meta joke to do with the book, if you know, you know), if the expectations of the initial few chapters were fulfilled. It can’t have its cake and eat it too. If I was more interested in the granular satirical beats I think that might have landed, but the self-awareness and sense of humour this book uses to troll the expectations the reader is given does not work for me, at all.

The protagonist is a writer, and a professor, and critics of her second book trolled her in the same way people will troll this book. Meta. The symbolism is actually real. Meta. And we say it out loud in a kitsch phrase in this book. Meta. Ironing ironies. Wry wry-ness. Trolling autofiction with auto fiction. What can autofiction do and what can’t it do—literalized! Her novel was critiqued for being solipsistic and this novel is too!

You know that scene in Seinfeld when the woman who is Elaine’s friend (who will go on to play Janice in Friends, you’ll notice) talks about how dating “nice” guys sucks, because they always say things like, You’re too good for me, Why are you with me? and eventually she just says, you know what? you’re right! Well the “nice” guys in this book is all the meta context drops (usually through dialogue) pointing to the flaws present in the book, only with a sense of humour. Except every time books try this my reaction to their pointing out their own flaws it to say: You know what? you’re right!