If there were just 1/5 fewer mentions of the color of her hair and skin or his eyes the book could have been half as long. Even the plot was too repetitive. I wish we could have seen more of their childhood problems play out in flashbacks or conversations, rather than just hear their inner monologues “what-if this relationships turns out like my mom/dad” the whole book.

Don’t even get me started on that baby’s name.

This book had beautiful and hilarious parts to it, but the privilege Sedaris brags about annoyed me more than in his previous work. I continue to hope that the pandemic is making people more community-oriented, but I continue to be disappointed. Sedaris boasts about breaking stay at home rules, cared more about his favorite stores being looted than the goals of BLM, brags about how he and his sister bought the apartments above theirs during this housing crisis (and hardly use them), uses the slur for Romani people, and is generally so privileged that he stopped reading the news all together after Biden won (an argument to be made that liberals disengaging after winning elections is why nothing Democrats promise on the campaign trail gets done once in office but I could write my own book on that.)   

Read this for a book club, which I’m grateful for because I probably wouldn’t have found it on my own. However, it wasn’t my favorite. At first I was intrigued by the writing style. All the exclamation points threw me off, but it was interesting how much of the book was only dialogue. But when the story kept jumping to new characters, and they were almost exclusively men, I got tired of it. (Though maybe I should be glad it was mostly men as the women who are in the book are so stereotyped in their actions, and I read the author was accused multiple times of sexual harassment) 
If it wasn’t so short and wasn’t for the book club I probably wouldn’t have finished the book.

Picked it up for free after I finished the book I’d brought with me on a trip. Thought it might be a fun nostalgic read despite all the problematic things baked into the series, and had a little hope some things would be improved on. I was wrong.