The book is bad ... Melania’s tendency to skate over useful information in favor of gassing up her husband ... In at least one place, she has ripped language from previous interviews and statements without attribution ... Readers hoping for an intimate glimpse of the relationship between Mr. and Mrs. Trump, following the earliest moments of their relationship, will be disappointed.
Slim ... A brazen whitewash of a presidency and a marriage of some tumult ... Less a confessional than a C. V., most notable for what it leaves out than what it includes.
The writing is riddled with generalities and clichés, at a level I haven’t seen since teaching college-freshman comp in the early twenty-tens ... In matters of political import, Melania gives us not much ... While I find her words on abortion commendable, it might be the only surprising contribution that Melania makes, and the fact that the passage was advertised in advance reads to me as a promotional smoke screen, to distract from the book’s more general emptiness.
She appears to have turned not caring into its own superpower ... Trump’s first impeachment gets about one page, compared with about four devoted to Melania’s failed caviar-based skin-care brand from 2013 ... What is fascinating about the book—if you can bear being beaten over the head with adjectives—is how early on Melania learns that the art of selective attention will set her free ... Fact-checking her memoir is, in some ways, beside the point.
A 180-page exercise in buck-passing and blame-dodging ... By no means an exhaustive read, but it does leave the reader asking why she has chosen to bare her soul just weeks before the election.
Those hoping for an intimate peek at the private lives of the Trumps will be disappointed. This book is deeply weird. It isn’t clear from Melania’s description of her family members that she has actually met them ... Even Melania’s pre-political memories are lifeless ... Melania is a profoundly sad document of a woman peering down on her own existence from the penthouse suite, unable to identify any of the figures half a kilometre below, but trying nonetheless to interpret what life might be like down there ... Beware: the desire to hunt for depths within women where they don’t exist is a holdover from past feminist interventions, a wish to humanise the scapegoats of the past.
