... funny and wise ... While the [story line focussing on the TV show 'Transparent'] is fascinating and fun, it’s Soloway’s deeply considered and honestly depicted quest for an authentic self that gives this memoir its depth ... Collectively these voices shape Soloway’s awakening as an artist and as a person, but it’s the book’s interpretation of their work that speaks so urgently to our cultural moment. She Wants It dives deep into the meaning of female consent... and the cultural costs of men silencing women in order to protect other men in power.
Soloway...writes with self-awareness about their jealousy of more successful peers; their messy divorce; the integration of their life into the show’s story lines; and their mistakes and triumphs ... This is an honest look at Soloway’s mind-opening journey, which allowed for deeper understanding of Hollywood’s patriarchy as well as of the author’s own gender, art, and self.
...just south of worth purchasing at the airport ... it is incompetent, defensive, and astonishingly clueless ... The nicest thing that can be said of this oblivious, self-absorbed, unimportant book is that it proves, once and for all, that trans people are fully, regrettably human ... Evidently no one at Random House could be bothered to crack open the old Wheelock ... self-importance alone could never guarantee writing this atrocious ... Soloway introduces deep-sounding quotes from other authors like a middle-schooler phoning in a Kate Chopin paper ... Throughout She Wants It, Soloway alternates, confusingly, between contradictory sites of gender enunciation ... Soloway certainly makes it easy to believe the longstanding charge that she sees trans people as creative oil to be fracked ... But nothing is more cringeworthy than Soloway’s account of the #MeToo movement ... Our author often appears to believe she can take history’s pulse by glancing at her own Fitbit ... The only conclusion to be drawn from this very bad book, which puts the 'self' in 'self-aware,' is that Jill Soloway has an unstoppable, pathological urge to tell on herself.
An adroit memoir ... There’s a lot to chew on...and Soloway’s meditations become more complex, some of it in the shadow of the unfolding #MeToo movement ... An assumption-exploding, smart account of creativity, work, and a decidedly unconventional life.
This intimate, funny memoir ... is more than just a showbiz chronicle; it’s a personal reflection, and Soloway shows incredible warmth toward almost everyone in their circle and toward their past self, even when it’s clear they’re looking back on professional or romantic choices they would not have made in retrospect. Soloway’s sharp humor carries the day in an unusually kind and self-aware memoir that will both make readers laugh and leave them optimistic.
