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A review by ash_hernick
Do I Feel Better Yet?: Questionable Attempts at Self-Care and Existing in General by Madeleine Trebenski
3.0
I received this book as an ARC. My review might not apply completely to the final published version of this book.
"Do I Feel Better Yet?" felt like a mixed bag of personal essays, snippets of satire, and lists vaguely reminiscent of what you might find on BuzzFeed. Like most anthologies, it was a bit of a mixed bag - I had a particularly hard time reading "Anything Men Can Do I Can Do Bleeding" which (despite a vaguely trans-inclusive note at the beginning) felt pretty tone-deaf to trans people - some other siilar pieces had the same problem later on, but this was the one I found most difficult to read, as a trans person myself. It focused on how the writer gets her period and still has to go to work, while the men she works with don't understand her struggle. I understand the importance of talking about menstruation openly and overall eliminating the taboo around periods, but Trebenski pretty quickly fell into the trap of "people who menstruate = women" and "people who don't menstruate = men" which rubbed me the wrong way.
There were some essays I thought were really interesting - I thought "Have You Tried Hypnotizing Yourself Calm?" was a particularly original piece. Some of Trebenski's work genuinely made me laugh out loud, too, which was great! This is supposed to be partially satire, after all - I think? I guess that's one of the problems I had with this book: some of the satire REALLY works, and sometimes it fails spectacularly. Especially when covering topics like mental illness and recovery, I feel like it's important that your jokes on the matter don't fall flat. Of course, I know that a joke that lands for someone might not seem funny to me, so I can't be too frustrated about this.
I did feel like "Do I Feel Better Yet?" suffered from too much filler. Not all of the essays directly related to the theme of the anthology, and some of them didn't seem to have any connection to it at all. These tended to be the weakest essays and distracted me from what I actually liked about the book in the first place. I think that this book would be stronger if it was cut down a bit - sticking to the strongest pieces would be best, even if it cuts down on page count.
"Do I Feel Better Yet?" felt like a mixed bag of personal essays, snippets of satire, and lists vaguely reminiscent of what you might find on BuzzFeed. Like most anthologies, it was a bit of a mixed bag - I had a particularly hard time reading "Anything Men Can Do I Can Do Bleeding" which (despite a vaguely trans-inclusive note at the beginning) felt pretty tone-deaf to trans people - some other siilar pieces had the same problem later on, but this was the one I found most difficult to read, as a trans person myself. It focused on how the writer gets her period and still has to go to work, while the men she works with don't understand her struggle. I understand the importance of talking about menstruation openly and overall eliminating the taboo around periods, but Trebenski pretty quickly fell into the trap of "people who menstruate = women" and "people who don't menstruate = men" which rubbed me the wrong way.
There were some essays I thought were really interesting - I thought "Have You Tried Hypnotizing Yourself Calm?" was a particularly original piece. Some of Trebenski's work genuinely made me laugh out loud, too, which was great! This is supposed to be partially satire, after all - I think? I guess that's one of the problems I had with this book: some of the satire REALLY works, and sometimes it fails spectacularly. Especially when covering topics like mental illness and recovery, I feel like it's important that your jokes on the matter don't fall flat. Of course, I know that a joke that lands for someone might not seem funny to me, so I can't be too frustrated about this.
I did feel like "Do I Feel Better Yet?" suffered from too much filler. Not all of the essays directly related to the theme of the anthology, and some of them didn't seem to have any connection to it at all. These tended to be the weakest essays and distracted me from what I actually liked about the book in the first place. I think that this book would be stronger if it was cut down a bit - sticking to the strongest pieces would be best, even if it cuts down on page count.