RaveThe New York Times Book ReviewBy all laws of literary physics, this memoir shouldn’t work at all. There is very little story, almost no conflict, not many scenes played out as actual scenes and no dialogue that actually appears in quotation marks. At the end of the book, everyone is essentially the same as they were at the beginning. No one has learned a lesson or become a better person. It’s thrilling ... We are accustomed to reading about terrible divorces. You could fill an entire bookstore with memoirs containing scenes of dishes thrown across rooms, $500-an-hour lawyers, psychologically ravaged children and surgically enhanced replacement wives. What is less familiar, at least on the page, are stories of marriages that die from no known cause. As such, This Story Will Change is not so much a memoir about a divorce as a case study of one marriage and what killed it. It’s not a matter of who’s guilty, but what caused the marriage to end seemingly before its time. The wife may be baffled, but she’s full of theories about what went wrong and why.
Rebecca Woolf
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewWoolf is at her best when delving into the fast and brutal progression of Hal’s illness. Her account of his final months is unflinching and brutally precise. Woolf has taken an inventory of the barbaric accouterments of illness, and she presses these details into her scenes like spikes. The barf bags and spit cups, the sponge pops and no-slip socks, the folding canes that give way to tennis-ball-padded walkers and then wheelchairs: It’s a singular category of horror and she nails it ... as competently as Woolf handles the death, the desire leaves rather too much lying naked on the page, simultaneously overwrought and undercooked ... you can’t help getting the feeling that she wasn’t sure where to take the story after Hal’s death, so decided to throw every self-empowerment bromide she could summon onto the page ... The result is a salmagundi of boilerplate #MeToo musings, wannabe bad girl confessions and elliptical woo-speak dressed up as deep thoughts, at which Woolf is exceptionally adept.
Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney
MixedThe New York Times Book Review... rich with such biblical qualities ... The constant internal struggle between what the heart wants versus what it should be grateful it already has serves as the primary emotional engine of Good Company. (There is also a heart leitmotif — a heart attack, a heart-shaped locket, an infant heart surgery patient — that is administered perhaps a bit too thickly) ... If this sounds like promotional copy for a Netflix poster, well … success! Reading Good Company, I found myself mentally auditioning actors for the inevitable series. Tellingly, I did not find myself imagining more than a handful of actual, real-time scenes, because the book doesn’t have all that many. Much of the first third of the novel is taken up with back story ... the behind-the-scenes machinations of the \'Cedar\' set offer moments of delicious satire ... Sweeney is uncommonly skilled at gently lampooning Hollywood ... Good Company, with its pre-scouted locations and fully rendered characters looking for things to do, is a promising piece of I.P. Sweeney may or may not have screenwriting ambitions, but I’d love to see her do something with it.
J.D. Vance
RaveThe New York Times Book Review...an affectionate yet unflinching look at growing up in social and domestic chaos in southwestern Ohio ... if Vance is an adroit enough storyteller, he’s a fiercely astute social critic of the sort we desperately need right now. Instead of cleaving his narrative to a political or ideological agenda, he wrestles honestly with the messy contradictions inherent to any conversation about race or class.
Garrard Conley
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewMany readers of Boy Erased will be as enraged as Conley. But they will also see the story through the lens of his compassion for those who genuinely thought they were trying to help, particularly his mother, who’s finally the one to say, 'We’re stopping all of this now,' when Conley reaches the breaking point.
