The premise is amazing - you get a husband from the attic, and anytime you want you can send him back up and get a brand new one. This was ripe for philosophical discourse on love and toughing it out and discovering what "the one" really means. In practice we got literally hundreds of husbands with zero investment in the vast majority of them. Each husband was named and dedicated a few sentences to a few paragraphs - and I couldn't bring myself to care. I knew he would get sent back up the attic in a page or two! I was also disappointed that Lauren's reasoning behind sending the men back into the attic wasn't explored; she didn't like someone's nose or his shirt was weird and she just sent him back up. This would have been fine for a few husbands, but the lack of depth became ridiculous after a while. I ended up skimming the last quarter of the book and didn't miss much.

This is one of those special reading experiences where the story plays out like a movie, wildly entertaining with life-like characters, while still delivering beautiful writing on the line level. There were passages that made me laugh, others that made me think about capitalism and generational wealth and nepotism, others that made me deeply sympathetic for the characters. Yes, this is a quiet novel where not much happens, but the voices in this book are so loud you would never notice.

I listened to this on audiobook, highly recommend - it's narrated by the author and adds a depth I don't think would have come across on the written page. Patric is incredibly candid about her experience as a sociopath, letting us into all the gritty details from stabbing a classmate in the neck as a child to breaking and entering homes as an adult. The most eye-opening part of it all is how misunderstood sociopaths and psychopaths are; since the vast majority do not get treatment (or even diagnosed) until they commit a crime, many sociopaths go under the radar, and our perception of them is skewed by the worst offenders. This memoir gave such an honest and intimate account of the reality of sociopathy (which, apparently 1 in 10 people are sociopathic) and drives home that sociopaths are not inherently bad people, but simply people struggling with a disorder that has little to no social acceptance or rehabilitation protocols. This felt like reading a diary or talking to a best friend - the information and research is present without feeling like a lecture. One of those great nonfictions that entertains as it informs.