PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksOn the surface, Hansen’s book appears to have a similar premise. A young, white, American woman decides to leave New York to take a writing fellowship in Turkey, and through this experience, she has a series of small realizations that culminate in an epiphany about her identity ...characterize her years as an American abroad not as 'a joyous romp of self-discovery and romance' but as 'more of a shattering and a shame' ... All of these pieces of her as an individual and as part of the collective white Americanness that she attempts to identify and define throughout the book snake through the historical and political narrative that she weaves ... While it bears traces of memoir and of travel writing, her methodology also taps into ethnography and political theory.
