RaveAir MailSuch is the paradox of Eve Babitz: When she’s not gossiping, bragging, or showering on praise worthy of a press release, she’s issuing unrepentant verdicts on widely beloved icons ... Babitz embraces an unself-conscious high-is-low/low-is-high perspective that places her well ahead of her time ... I Used to Be Charming might offer an uneven ride, swinging from thoughtful pop-culture analysis to extended bouts of name-dropping to frothy musings about which types of man legs are the sexiest, but it’s never the least bit boring. There’s something divine about Babitz’s vision of the world, mixed with some incandescent undercurrent of delusion—sordid, surreal, and alienated from reality ... Every essay lurches as unpredictably as Babitz’s prose, toggling rapidly between sneering and leering. But even when Babitz leers, it’s like the Pope waving through the glass of his Popemobile: her leering conveys a blessing.
Claire Dederer
PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewClaire Dederer sidesteps both theatrical prose and broad clichés in favor of frank and colorful admissions of impatience, lust and guilt. Maybe because Dederer never tries to sweeten her suffering with sentimentality, it feels less onerous to ride sidesaddle on her journey through the barren flats of holy matrimony ... Dederer’s comical, erratic storytelling is nuanced and unpredictable, dwelling on the recklessness of youth without ever selling short the courage and daring it took to be so reckless. She brings all of the arrogance and longing of early sexual exploration to vivid life with real empathy and verve ... Dederer is an excellent writer who spins her prose with the casual grace and easy humor of a seasoned professional. Yet by the end of the book, her strange, nonlinear tour ends up feeling a little rushed and incomplete.
Dani Shapiro
MixedThe New York Times Book ReviewSuch brutal honesty is the bread and butter of the marriage memoir, yet Shapiro still manages to make her husband sound quirky and tenacious in the manner of the best romantic comedy leads. And her prose has a way of making even mundane disappointments feel portentous and universal, if a little melodramatic ... To Shapiro’s credit, by the end of her short book, we want to know what will happen next — but we come away with more philosophical musing instead. 'Time is like a tall building made of playing cards,' she tells us, meaning we’re all in this crazy, unpredictable mess together. But we’re not quite buying it. 'Use sturdier building materials!' we want to tell her.
Maria Semple
RaveBookforumYou don't need to be a disheveled, distracted human who hates board games to relate to Semple's protagonist from the start, maybe because contemporary culture has a way of making us all feel like failures just for being alive ... even as Semple distills the modern state of adult life with breathtaking precision, she also poses bigger questions ... She infuses each scene with jokes and insights, so that even seemingly trivial interactions with odious parents and an awkward lunch with a long-lost acquaintance veer into unexpectedly rich territory ... Semple has mastered the intersection of sad and nuts like no one else ... a reckless and scattershot work of genius.
Kate Bolick
PositiveThe New York Times Book Review[Spinster] can be unnerving and downright inspired. Like many engrossing books, Spinster is first and foremost a product of the author’s long-term obsession: to reject the conventional female trajectory for something that feels a little more expansive and full of promise ... the most engrossing passages in the book focus on the joys of solitude. Bolick is at the height of her powers when describing the peculiar — and sometimes hard to capture — satisfactions of being alone.
