There are structural things about this work that are super interesting to me. It’s intersectional with auto fiction and nonfiction and literary fiction, for one, which creates a dissonance that makes a lot of sense when considering the ending of the story.

It made me think about how it’s a bit ingenious to make it intersectional like this in order to shift POV. Sometimes you’re Kim, sometimes you’re a disembodied watcher, and you don’t really know why for quite some time. Sometimes the disembodied narrator empathizes with Kim so much it slips into narration from her perspective, but then it slips out again into a distant analysis. With the last sentence of the work, I found that very clever.

It also effectively shifts the problems Kim faces from societal to the individual level. While it’s hardly the first to do this, I think it’s way more effective to demonstrate micro aggressions and misogyny from within a characters headspace because then male readers, such as myself, aren’t able to distance ourselves—which again, ties in nicely to the ending.

I totally understand why someone who was expecting literary fiction would feel let down. Expectations from that genre are so different from the goals of this book. It’s important to prepare the reader. I had already read reviews about this and knew it was different, so I had no problems on that front. It’s a challenging thing to classify, but I typically like these kinds of outliers.

Also, the narrator was great, imo!