PositiveThe San Francisco ChronicleTaken together, these vignettes make up a sharply intimate portrait of what it is to be a person in a body — and in particular, a female body ... O’Farrell brings a fiction writer’s sense of pacing to her own life. She knows how to moderate drama with finesse. She moves effectively into the second and third person at times, alternately drawing the reader close to her bodily experience and disembodying it. The book has its pitfalls. O’Farrell sometimes strays into too much exposition, and occasionally the cliche ... Reading the book was a bit like peering through a lighted window into someone else’s living room. It’s rare to get a look so closely at a person’s brushes with mortality, and rarer still for that portrait to be so elegant. After all, mortality is a subject that often leaves people searching for words. O’Farrell finds good ones.
