Intense and surprisingly granular. It’s interesting what she chooses to include and what she doesn’t. It’s a bit of a mixed bag for me, as this feels disjointed or meandering from the centre. Especially around food? It could almost be a legit cook book at times. Despite this, there’s plenty of moments that were affecting. She has a unique visual relationship with objects that springboard her into thoughts that was really interesting.

There is that quality though, sometimes, when things are described with such specificity that it undermines the memoir, you know? Like… some of this must be fiction how could you recall all this detail from 10 year old memories during innocuous and inconsequential connective tissue events? The less subjective memories are, the more I pull back as a reader. That’s just how I tend to react.

It’s also just… weird sometimes when the author chooses to narrate their own book. It’s really hard to narrate anything effectively, but with this kind of subject matter, more so. The author gave a pretty disaffected reading and they took the wind of the sails of impactful moments. The writing is pretty strong regardless, it’s just, yeah, weird. I think usually authors should not be the ones narrating because when you know it’s them and it’s almost always flat, it’s difficult not to think I could get more from the voice just reading it off text. Yet I somehow always end up thinking when I choose the audiobook that it could be that rare time when the text really comes alive because the author knows their material so well and have most likely spoken it aloud when writing and editing it.