A compelling portrait ... McPhee’s prose is steady, her tone thoughtful. She examines events of the past from all angles. She is amazingly generous ... Carefulness adds to her credibility; she positions herself neither as victim nor saint but as someone who, she says, only wants to be good.
She spares neither herself nor family members from criticism in this prickly, wide-ranging account of the many ways in which the past seeps into and poisons the present.
One of the book’s many strengths is the author’s ability to see herself clearly: The passages in which she narrates her own bad behavior are fascinating, which is rare in the memoir genre.
