The line that particularly attacked me: "... If I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me then feel sorry for me."

 As with most essay collections, some are more interesting than others. I enjoy Ashleigh Young's writing, but a lot of this book feels like an MFA student trying to spin a mundane life into an interesting story that will receive the necessary critical praise from fellow MFA students with mundane lives. My favorite essays are "Bones," "She Cannot Work," and "Anemone." 

This book is good and very engaging, but it's just too much for me to handle. I'm fighting the chemical imbalance in my brain and currently it's winning

 this book has everything: gaslighting, gatekeeping, and, most importantly, girlbossing.

I find this book so fascinating. At times it seems like R.F. Kuang took things from her own life (being a literary darling, having to "tone down" the harshness of history to make it palatable for white audiences, and the pressures of publishing), but took that framework and crafted an insane, messy story with an incredibly unlikable, unsympathetic, narcissistic narrator. If you only read this book for the plot and don't think any more critically about it than that (or if you've never read a protagonist who wasn't a hero), I could understand why you might not enjoy this book. Still, I'm having a lot of fun reading through the one-star reviews on Goodreads, as it feels like parts of the book are being acted out in real-time in the real world.

I feel like I could talk about this book for hours. (I probably will, when I get home and tell my husband all about it.) This book consumed my brain and would not let it go. Highly recommend this, and specifically, listening to the audiobook. It somehow makes it both more shocking and more palatable.