Reviews

Swallowing and swallowing and swallowing the bitter makes you immune to the harm, and before you know it you are happy to think this is how you are to be fed.

Dixon doesn't exactly indulge in her despair, as witness how it influences her, how she makes room and routines and rituals for it. While she's sometimes hopeful, she more often acknowledges her catastrophizing, the thoughts that find a future in which today's unpleasantness has become a prolonged, ever-present: What if she's always lonely? Perpetually performing? Forever disjointed?

This feels like a fogged mirror of our times, a chopped up remix of what it is to be online but alone, creative for clicks, adrift in the manufactured always-happy of our public personas. Dixon writes from the other side of the fun house mirror, wanting to be seen as weary, not horrifying, as needing, not needy. Wanting to be seen (or does she?) Her words stretch into the upset, the gut twist of wondering whether her full self can be, let alone embraced.

truoutrageousjem's review against another edition

Go to review page

informative sad fast-paced

3.0

calicos's review against another edition

Go to review page

emotional reflective sad tense medium-paced

4.25

The first bit of this book is one of the most raw, beautiful and heartbreaking descriptions of loneliness I’ve read. I related deeply to it and enjoyed this book a lot as it made me feel seen.

eileen_critchley's review against another edition

Go to review page

dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

3.0

Kind of dark, kind of sad. The first half was stronger for me, my interest waned in the second. Odd for a short book, to feel I had to push through to finish.

{library, paperback}

More...