RaveThe Women\'s Review of Books... a memoir in essays that, taken together, form less a trajectory than they do a blast radius ... Hough’s writing about her post-cult life buzzes with tension between a fearful goal of fitting in and the eventual relief of belonging she finds via fellow queers, a job as a club bouncer, and drugs. Hough’s side-eye at American systems that conflate conformity and morality—the suburbs, the pharmaceutical industry, pop-culture attempts at LGBTQ \'inclusion\'—is as heartbroken as it is piercing. Either way, Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing is impossible to forget.
Shelly Oria
PositiveThe Women’s Review of BooksThe book, whose title is taken from Christine Blasey Ford’s September 2018 testimony during the confirmation hearings of now-seated Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, collects 22 personal essays, poems, and prose pieces, all brimming with emotion that’s barely contained by their brief format ... Many of the works in the book speak to the first part of Blasey Ford’s recollection, the way she identified, with clinical precision, the hidden place where sickeningly familiar memories are stored ... But the second half of Blasey Ford’s statement— the part about the laughter—is less in evidence here ... the experience of being the butt of a joke and also being expected to laugh simmers in Indelible’s subtext, but remains underexplored in these writings. That’s not to say that the pieces themselves don’t contain the dark humor that feels necessary to numb #MeToo’s painful mundanity ... Indelible in the Hippocampus invites us to bear witness to the voices that aren’t the loudest, the splashiest, or the most demanding of a platform, but are the ones in whose many facets we can all recognize ourselves.
Jessica Valenti
PositiveThe GuardianAs one of America’s best-known and often divisive feminists, Valenti is surely all too familiar with hearing stories that other people tell about her, which makes Sex Object a bold undertaking. It’s also one that fits seamlessly within the feminist tradition of consciousness-raising....An alternative to teaching girls to shrink themselves, or suggesting they develop a bright, ever-hardening shell, is crucial. That alternative isn’t necessarily presented in Sex Object. (Indeed, the book goes out on a sour note, with a litany of horrible tweets and Facebook messages sent to Valenti in recent years.) And it won’t be realized without a shift that requires all of us first to believe that stories like hers, and millions of others, are real.
