Ok, I did not read this book in one continuous setting. Rather, I inserted a 1 month gap because my brain was having trouble following along the long form essays (2nd grade teacher told my parents I had reading comprehension issues, and it's STILL REAL!)

now that I'm on Christmas vacation I've learned that when given a relaxed, no time pressure environment (aka, not the couch right after work -> dinner -> with boyfriend sitting nearby ready to talk about our days), non fiction essays are FUN to read!

These essays were great. She's in the same generation as we millenials and applies a critical but not overly skeptical eye to institutions, behaviors, entertainments that our generation enjoys or is subject to. I haven't quite read anything like it. Some essays that I remember stood out:
1. the one about beauty standards being repackaged as "self care" (MIND BLOWN!)
2. scammers (I can tell she's a democratic socialist)


Did not enjoy the one about weddings (too much year by year history of weddings, felt like it was mostly about white women vs. an intersectional analysis, and I started and closed a wedding company so I didn't enjoy the company -_-)

It's taken me a bit to collect my thoughts on this book, but I really enjoyed some essays. Others didn't particularly resonate with me, but I think that's the nature of essay collections. My favorites were the earlier ones, with "Always be Optimizing" being my favorite. I also particularly enjoyed "The I In Internet," "Ecstasy," and especially "Pure Heroines." Some of the later essays fell a bit flat for me, but overall, I think this is worth reading if the premise sounds interesting!

Some of my favorite moments:

*"The internet is defined by a built-in performance incentive. in real life, you can walk around living life and be visible to other people but you can’t just walk around and be visible on the internet — for anyone to see you, you have to act." (8)
*"I wish I had learned to read [literary heroines]… with the same complicated, ambivalent, essential freedom that a daughter feels when she looks at her mother, understanding her as a figure that she simultaneously resists and depends on; a figure that she uses, cruelly and lovingly and gratefully, as the base from which to become something more." (129)
*"Researchers believed that MDMA treatment would be discrete and limited—that once you got the message, as they put it, you could hang up the phone. You would be better for having listened. You would be changed. They don’t say this about religion, but they should." (149)
* “'I cannot go toward God in love without bringing myself along.' Being a writer compounds the dilemma: to articulate this desire to vanish is always to reiterate the self once again." (152)
*"On the wings of market-friendly feminism, the idea that personal advancement is a subversive form of political progress has been accepted as gospel… the problem is that a feminism that prioritizes the individual will always, at its core, be at odds with a feminism that prioritizes the collective." (179)