... fearless, insightful, devastating, and beautiful. It broke my heart, and it twisted up my insides. The stories are still sitting in my gut.

In her carefully concocted but unfermented new memoir...the ensuing portrait Danler composes of herself resembles a Cubist Picasso, broken into bits and incongruously reassembled.

... can feel both piecemeal and blinkered by its own privilege (private schools, last-minute trips to Spain), but it’s powerful, too: a raw, often lyrical portrait of pain, loss, and learning to let go..

The memoir centers on damaging behavior—substance abuse, physical abuse and painful cycles of neglect—but is written in gripping and refreshingly plain terms.

... an exhilarating readability and sense of plot.

... fierce, unsparing.

I wish I could say it lives up to my expectations. Some of the essays that seeded the book were extremely powerful. But I found myself desperately wishing that I was reading a novel so I could expect some kind of plot arc. There is none, unless you consider a head-spinning update in the last 10 pages a story line.

Danler's...memoir crosses the line into narcissism.

Stray makes efforts to disrupt and interrogate a narrative structure — perhaps one particularly prevalent in memoirs dealing with the course of addiction — that ends with any kind of clear solution or release.

Danler's first memoir is as well-written as her novel was, but it can be as frustrating for readers as it was for her friends and family—indeed, as it was for the author herself—to watch her going back and forth with the married lover she calls the 'Monster,' with whom she ended things for good countless times.