RaveBOMBThe astonishing clarity with which Febos has previously written about sex work, addiction, love, and misogyny continues to scaffold new insights as she scrutinizes her romantic and sexual past. Looking back, she recognizes her inability to tolerate disappointing others; her inclination toward people-pleasing spills quickly into self-abandonment or using others. Her insights are not limited to the realm of intimacy, for Febos comes to understand that her talents for seduction and flattery have also been powerful tools in her work as a restaurant server and a dominatrix. Notably, she highlights that in her more recent work as an educator these skills are used to enamor her students with the subject matter rather than with herself to extract compensation. Many moments when reading, the posture of Febos’s prose struck me as so erect, her vision so clear-sighted that the truths she relays made me wince, insisting I turn toward the blinding glare of my own self-reflection ... With her sharp feminist perspective, Febos examines instances when she wavers in her resolution to forgo sex, inviting readers to attune to the more granular ways being socialized as a woman has detrimental effects. She lingers on subtle experiences—like briefly catching another’s gaze or feeling the closeness of another’s hips—that a less observant writer might overlook ... Her discernment here is humbling and beautiful. Febos’s search for herself outside of sexual entanglement leads her into a sacred sense of immanence—reveling in the world around her at every turn.
Catherine Lacey
RaveBOMB MagazineCriminally good ... Delightful ... Lacey’s ingenious and playful methods enact the same shape-shifting quality that this novel explores. She seamlessly alters and repurposes the work and words of countless artists and writers ... Lacey plunges us into the most pressing contemporary conversation about the performance of the self, means of representation, commodification of identity, and how identity markers are often fixed, though identity itself is not static.
