RaveThe Los Angeles Review of BooksAviv steps outside of these rigid explanations to paint more complex portraits of interiority ... Aviv does not attempt to replace imperfect wisdom with her own. She is a dogged epistemological lawyer for opposing sides of every argument ... Aviv is especially sharp in the granular — by focusing on the unique composition of each of these individuals’ perceptions, she can show how they change shape as soon as they come into contact with perceptions crafted in the forge of social history ... Mental health narrative frameworks can liberate, and they can bind. We need them, but we have to find a way not to be trapped by them either. Aviv’s writing locates its strength not in abjuring mental health concepts or strategies wholesale, but instead showing that every framework is part of its own zeitgeist. This doesn’t make them wrong or even ineffective necessarily, but it’s important to understand in what ways they are part of a web of ideologies that shift and change over time. We should still take our solutions where we can find them, of course, as long as we don’t become too attached to an idea of their everlasting categorical truth.
Jia Tolentino
PositiveLos Angeles Review of BooksTolentino’s book is about what it’s like to live right now, and its commentary is so up to date, and so close to our current moment, that it feels like a cheat code. But Tolentino is reflecting quickly and efficiently. She deftly lays out an up-to-the-minute analysis of contemporary life without making the reader feel claustrophobic. She discusses the evolution of the internet, the shifting landscape of boutique fitness and the beauty industry, what it means to get married in our current gender-political era, and, in a tour de force chapter, she encapsulates how the horror of late capitalism has mutated into our current scam millennia ... The most resonant chapter, however, is \'The Cult of the Difficult Woman,\' in which she outlines how the feminist principles that have flooded the mainstream have resulted in a blurred feminism with meaning so dispersed that it’s vulnerable to being co-opted by anyone, for anything ... Tolentino asks: is truly everything about being a woman politically meaningful?
