... fearless, insightful, devastating, and beautiful. It broke my heart, and it twisted up my insides. The stories are still sitting in my gut ... With insight and wit and startling honesty, [Danler] digs into the relationships that shaped and reshaped, again and again, her perspectives on family, love, and home ... Parts of Stray feel very much like a prayer ... Danler writes (beautifully, achingly) about the family she comes from and the one she's created for herself ... a book that goes there, and it sits with you. Certain scenes are unsettling ... By the time I turned those final pages, though, I somehow felt more centered. That's a testament to Danler's storytelling and to the crystal-clear lens she's turned back on to herself and her experiences.
In her carefully concocted but unfermented new memoir...the ensuing portrait Danler composes of herself resembles a Cubist Picasso, broken into bits and incongruously reassembled ... a literary It Girl...[Danler's] success story barely figures into Stray, despite the fact that the book is primarily occupied with her mind-set in those post-book-deal years. Danler never explicitly refutes the charmed image; she simply dips us in and out of enough familial screaming matches and self-destructive decisions that any previous assumptions about her blessedness melt away ... 'I’m a ruthless performer of likability,' she writes at one point. 'I come from a long line of charismatic liars,' she cheerfully admits at another. But she doesn’t go far beyond mere acknowledgment. Where, I kept wondering, is the moment that takes this story from recollection to something she has disassembled and futzed with and zealously turned over in her mind, until it has eventually taken on a brand-new shape? It’s such a thrill to watch a writer open up her greediest thoughts, to slice open little pockets of her skin and root around underneath her flesh. But disclosure is not revelation. She needn’t stitch herself back up...but it’s best to make sure that the blood lost will be worth it.
... can feel both piecemeal and blinkered by its own privilege (private schools, last-minute trips to Spain), but it’s powerful, too: a raw, often lyrical portrait of pain, loss, and learning to let go.
The memoir centers on damaging behavior—substance abuse, physical abuse and painful cycles of neglect—but is written in gripping and refreshingly plain terms ... Stray becomes a memoir about loss. In these moments she asks what it means to lose someone who is still very much alive, and how to rebuild broken bonds. Rootless and in mourning, Danler realizes that in order to usher in the new life she has earned, she’ll have to excavate the one she grieves.
... an exhilarating readability and sense of plot ... Acknowledging both the tribute of memory and the mercy of forgetting with one distinctive voice, this is a rare and skillfully structured view of an artist’s love, grief, and growth.
... fierce, unsparing ... In Danler’s evocation of California’s complicated history and the darkness that lurks under its sunny exterior, Stray brings to mind the work of Joan Didion, and her frank portrayal of the nightmare of addiction is akin to Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering. But in its painful candor and hard-earned wisdom, Stray is every bit its own vivid creation.
I wish I could say it lives up to my expectations. Some of the essays that seeded the book were extremely powerful. But I found myself desperately wishing that I was reading a novel so I could expect some kind of plot arc. There is none, unless you consider a head-spinning update in the last 10 pages a story line ... Despite the author’s skills at observation and phrasemaking, the narrative manages to ping-pong between the two most dangerous possibilities in memoir: boring on one side, TMI on the other ... Danler also struggles to be relatable ... Danler also manages to both overshare and withhold in a single paragraph ... As the book’s epigraph from Frank O’Hara says, 'Now I am quietly waiting for/ the catastrophe of my personality/ to seem beautiful again,/ and interesting, and modern.' Perhaps Danler should have waited a bit longer. Now in her mid-30s, she seems to have entered an exciting new phase of life — the material in this book might have worked better as a series of flashbacks in a more shapely story. And maybe it would have been slightly less concerning and unseemly. If she had waited, the love affair with the Monster wouldn’t have the feeling of fresh gossip we shouldn’t be privy to, and her sense of what should and shouldn’t be included in the book might have been clearer ... Better yet, go back to fiction, where we need her and miss her.
Danler's...memoir crosses the line into narcissism ... she would like readers to feel as sorry for her as she feels for herself. She would like us to believe that her life has been tragic when really it has been one of relative privilege, with none of its setbacks being out of the ordinary ... Though there may be interest owing to the author's high-profile first book, this too often self-indulgent memoir does not serve to enlighten readers about Danler's experience or life in general.
Stray makes efforts to disrupt and interrogate a narrative structure — perhaps one particularly prevalent in memoirs dealing with the course of addiction — that ends with any kind of clear solution or release ... Stray may eschew a linear shape in its storytelling, but it certainly is never shapeless. It’s broken into three sections: one focused primarily on Danler’s mother, one on her father and one on the married man with whom she is carrying on an affair ... Despite the memoir’s many markers of place, however, I sometimes was briefly disoriented as to where I was in its kaleidoscopic and occasionally blurry timeline. Still, part of Danler’s project here seems to be blurring boundaries ... Stray’s moments of greatest power are achieved in the instances where Danler unflinchingly describes and details those in-between borderless spaces.
Danler's first memoir is as well-written as her novel was, but it can be as frustrating for readers as it was for her friends and family—indeed, as it was for the author herself—to watch her going back and forth with the married lover she calls the 'Monster,' with whom she ended things for good countless times ... A mostly moving text in which writing is therapeutic and family trauma is useful material. Most readers will root for Danler.
