“Sentence for sentence, a more pleasure-yielding midlife memoir is hard to think of … This is all quite a treat: a 50ish lady memoirist with no epiphanies in sight. Nothing’s figured out and nothing’s getting better, except Dederer’s prose, which has acquired a wonderful sordidness … The memoir’s constantly shifting vantage points allow Dederer to keep returning to the same themes without wearing them out. What knits things together is, of course, sex—the stranger-fucking of adolescence, the been-there-done-that of married sex, the illicit flirtations, all the men who were and are a delivery system for sex, sex as a delivery system for an elusive sense of self. And the power of sex to unravel everything you thought you knew about yourself … Indeed, female masochism is a gift that keeps giving in Dederer’s hands. She gets as much mileage from it as Philip Roth did from Newark.”
–Laura Kipnis, The Atlantic, June 2017 Issue
Read more of Laura’s reviews here
