MixedThe Globe and MailIf you’re a woman, Fed Up will likely infuriate. Your attention may float away to the ridiculous requests your loved ones have saddled you with in the past week, month or year. What career goals did they achieve and what leisure time did they enjoy as you played personal assistant? ... While the author recognizes that women actually engineer some of their own emotional laboor, she doesn’t go deep enough on this hell of our own devising ... Fed Up would have benefited from a more rigorous critique of how women do this to themselves and each other. The author might have devoted more than a handful of pages, for instance, to the social origins and everyday consequences of crippling female perfectionism.
Edited by Roxane Gay
RaveThe Globe and MailIt is a difficult, almost unbearable look at what perpetrators are capable of. The details, devastation and sheer number of men helping themselves to the bodies of women, girls and boys deaden the reader. It is a critical work that makes this much clear: The violations #MeToo rages against can and do damage people for a lifetime ... They are a diverse group of women and men: famous and never published before, young and old, straight, queer and transgender. Among them are an army wife, a biochemist, an exterminator, a lawyer, a cartoonist, an eighties film icon and an author researching mental illness in the suburbs. Their stories make clear that the reverberations of sexual predation live on inside all kinds of people. Not That Bad peers into the psychology of victimhood, mining elements of sexual violence we don’t understand very well yet.
