PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksBy the book’s final pages, Phillips has rendered the term \"giving up\" spacious and flexible, having woven together psychology and literature to reveal suggestive points of contact. Even so, it’s a lot of material to fit under one terminological umbrella, and it can be challenging to grasp how exactly Phillips wields the term in discrete essays—much less to make those individual definitions cohere ... Phillips’s model is most compelling when grounded in the mechanics of literary characterization.
