MixediNews (UK)Reading it is exactly as grim and as exhausting as all that sounds. For a book about a life getting high, this is a collection only of lows ... It isn’t enjoyable (or funny, and Perry is funny) to read and it is not in the least bit glamorous. The chronology is scattered, he repeats himself and his anecdotes, and he at times seems bitter, while at others self-effacing. He has been in Alcoholics Anonymous for decades and at points his narration reads a little as if he is standing at a meeting, sharing his story ... Dark and miserable.
Emily Ratajkowski
MixediNews (UK)Ratajkowski, now 30, writes intimately and her essays are lucid, often self-indulgent and at times remarkably candid and raw: not only in revealing less-than-complimentary truths about her small, close family but about how inseparable her beauty has become from her sense of self ... This is a personal exploration that declares no intention to speak for anybody else, and by its own admission, is inconclusive – the collection closes with a sort of triumphant and too-neat claim over her own body and its true purpose as she gives birth to her son ... Yet it is still hard to escape the obvious fact that while Ratajkowksi is indeed a victim of a culture that values women’s beauty above all else – all women are victims of this – she still sits at the very top of the pile ... It is no great feminist breakthrough that one of the most famously beautiful women in the world should, now that she presumably no longer needs to save the money, feel conflicted about capitalising on her looks – or that she should feel frustrated that her intelligence is perceived as being secondary to her beauty, or that she should feel powerless. She at least enjoys the spoils: where does that leave the rest of us?
