I skimmed some of this but I'm going to count it as read. The essays about Saccharine and about female pain started to seem overly self-indulgent. Too many words! The latter could have been boiled down to two sentences: "The wounded woman gets called a stereotype and sometimes she is. But sometimes she's just true."  

As Jamison is writing about wounded women -- and men -- it's most effective when she concentrates mostly on them. Least when she's concentrating on herself. There are books where I appreciate learning of the author's feelings and perspectives but here it became too much.