Disarmingly frank and utterly engaging ... Christensen concentrates her gimlet eye on bad men, the women who enable them, and an industry all too eager to gobble up and discard young women ... Christensen reveals the ways that sometimes the stories we tell about ourselves — in fiction or memoir — are only as convincing and sincere as our ability to move past them.
Christensen executes a ninja takedown of toxic literary hypocrisy and an evisceration of the endless damage wrought by misogyny and sexual predation and violence.
In probing misogyny’s legacy and the uneasy intimacies among women, Christensen delivers a bracing meditation on trust, aging, and the wreckage violent men leave in their wake.
Nuanced if slow-paced ... Christensen includes passages from the memoir, which lend context to who Julia is now, but sap the momentum. Still, Julia’s complex characterization will stay with readers.
