Zambreno and Guibert are perhaps an odd couple. Where the latter wrote unabashedly of cruising and gay sex in a milieu that included Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes, Zambreno writes here of motherhood, adjunct teaching, and life in Brooklyn. She’s aware of the dissonanc...Yet, one of the pleasures of her book is the affinities she traces between herself and Guibert.

... her ability to write the horrors of being a body and a writer in a capitalist world crystallizes, becomes sharper. It was mainly written in the pandemic and the second half chronicles the world shutting down, and feeling that the world is also closing in on her is palpable.

Throughout the text Zambreno weaves in her personal obsessions, pointing out striking and sometimes tenuous parallels between consciousnesses—hers, Guibert’s, and Alex Suzuki’s—all grasping for connection within an ether of intertextual references, mazy interior monologues, and quotations that speak of one thing but point behind their backs at another.

... something akin to a medical approach.

Zambreno fluently interrogates how the traumatic specificities of the individually ill body signal and converse with a broader illness in the body politic. Her examination of the consequences of structural violence in our intimate lives—powerfully punctuated by recursive anxieties about living as an uninsured or otherwise politically 'dispensable' person in a world that will handily divest itself of responsibility for such people and bodies—stresses (in a phrase lately recited ad infinitum) that the cruelty is the point.

... clever.

... contemplative, rhetorically austere.