RaveThe New York Times Book Review\"... a hard-won inquiry into how we seek out the truth of ourselves and others in ways that often, by necessity, aren’t straightforward, that arrive in our lives in glimmering bits and shards ... The difficulty in overcoming this instinct to code and conceal is what gives Shapland’s book its considerable stakes ... Shapland’s book is the kind of state-of-the-form reckoning that makes one wish there were more like it. The truth is, doing the work of retrospective, corrective rearranging (pretty much the job description of any critic or academic working today) is never without risk. Surely, the more transparently we acknowledge the stakes, the more likely we are to arrive at a payoff. After all, it’s often by looking back that we move the conversation forward, and by inhabiting the lives of others that we might glimpse pieces of our own.\
