MixedWired...written with the kind of piquant ambivalence that triggers a salivary response, followed by spitting cries of Didion’s umpteenth coming, in so many modern readers. Wiener is a rock-solid writer ... Wiener, who lived within yet strains to see from without, is never sure where she stands ... To stay sane as everyone around her drinks the Kool-Aid (or butter coffee), Wiener never relinquishes her outsider status. Instead, she tells herself she’s making good on her college degree and doing sociology—tech as her laboratory. Here may be the source of the struggle ... What makes this all the more frustrating is that Wiener can write an immaculate sentence ... She’s also a master of the descriptive arts ... Sentence-level flourishes never add up to text-level sophistication, though. Nor do they make this memoir literary, a descriptor Wiener is clearly chasing ... Read it. Don’t read it. Love it. Hate it.
