RaveThe Observer (UK)The story moves gracefully across timelines ... While occasionally overindulging the dramatic – numerous mementos are, quite unnecessarily, burned, sliced, and drowned – these pages are filled with love, even as that love is strained and misshapen. Fallon’s faith in sincerity is disarming ... What keeps Family Drama from collapsing into melodrama is Fallon’s exquisite attention to physicality ... A soap opera may deal in illusion, but Family Drama returns us to the body – as proof of love, damage, and the inheritances parents leave behind, willingly or otherwise.
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (UK)Moves with crazed propulsion, uninterrupted by paragraphs or chapter breaks ... The prose is electrically weird, at once flippant and yearning, affectless and romantic – in other words, messy, too. Yet, in our narrator’s relentless interiority, something close to the truth begins to coagulate. Cleaner reads less like a coming-of-age novel than the delineation of a fugue state. Its real force lies in its refusal to distinguish between the grotesque and the sublime.
RaveTimes Literary Supplement (TLS)Ambitious in its emotional scope ... Jimmie’s co-workers show Volckmer at her most startling ... A bathroom rendezvous provides a diverting counterpoint to the book’s mostly ruminative narration ... Amusing ... Katharina Volckmer’s jokes are always consequential, and her novel ends up saying much that is profound about work and isolation and capitalist estrangement.
PositiveThe New StatesmanIt is easy to cringe, but it is this conviction that has made Gilbert into such a phenomenon. What makes her so hateable is also what makes her so effective: a total refusal of irony, an evangelical belief in the therapeutic value of disclosure ... Is Gilbert a narcissist? Of course she is. But so is every memoirist worth reading ... If there’s any terminal uniqueness here, it isn’t Gilbert’s, it’s her critics’, convinced their barbs are unprecedented, even as they repeat the same old charge against the one woman who’s already outlived it.
