MixedLos Angeles Review of BooksReduces the two writers not so much to brands as to types, two girls fat and thin ... Anolik needs to commit to the binary bit to justify the book’s existence ... At her best, Anolik channels the collagist sensibility that Babitz took from the visual to the verbal ... Even I—someone who, like Anolik, is on \'Team Babitz\'—longed for taut, spare, cold, clear, clean sentences.
Olivia Laing
PositiveThe New YorkerExtended discussions of war, disease, and climate crisis do nothing to dampen the tone of the book, which proceeds like a pleasant garden-party conversation. Laing is a welcoming but unobtrusive hostess, handling her dark materials with social grace ... She embeds others’ words in her own sentences as carefully as I imagine she transplants seedlings, adapting them to their new conditions without compromising their integrity ... There are sections that do, however, feel like a slog, waterlogged by dutiful moralizing.
Julia Fox
PositiveBookforumThe book is not without bizarre details ... But the overall image she presents of herself is almost archetypal ... In real life, or life mediated by non-print media, Fox is fantastically fascinating. Those who dismiss her as almost-famous-for-being-famous, trying and failing to keep up with the Kardashians, miss how perfectly she’s mastered her metamorphic art of self-fashioning.
