What Girls, which like SATC ran for six seasons (2012 to 2017), gets so hideously right is the body horror of young womanhood: it swaps soft-focus sex comedy with characters who are often grubby, flabby, ashamed and shockingly naked by the standards of primetime TV. The show’s early hype centered on this realism — and the seemingly compulsive frankness of its semi-autobiographical protagonist Hannah Horvath, played by Dunham. So often was she having terrible and humiliating on-screen sex, and so dramatically did she differ from the body types in porn where such acts were usually relegated, that Lena Dunham’s Body quickly came to dominate her public image. Reading her new memoir Famesick, released yesterday as a follow-up to the highly controversial 2014 essay collection Not That Kind of Girl, it’s obvious that in private, too, Dunham’s life was a kind of body horror.

Famesick is an account of Dunham’s twenties, which were pockmarked by maladies including shingles, colitis, appendix troubles, impetigo, endometriosis and then-undiagnosed Ehlers-Danlos syndrome — searing pains, surgeries upon surgeries and bedridden immobility relieved only by an ultimately problematic reliance on Klonopin. All the while she is tormented online by both fans and bullies — though mainly bullies — who love calling her variously “our fat sister” or a “fat whore” (depending on whether the intent is a compliment). Lena Dunham’s Body is pried at and poked on every page by characters ranging from a cleft-lipped early lover, the inspiration for Girls’s Adam, who gags her with her own tights, to a gynecologist who carries out an internal exam without her permission and bursts a cyst, “rip[ping] my fucking insides to shreds”. She crash diets on the advice of “proanorexia websites” then is told to regain the weight by a beloved but antagonistic TV producer who says: “It’s not funny if you’re too thin, it’s just Sex and the City all over again… if we lose it, we don’t have a clear voice.” Push and pull, push and pull; Dunham is at war with her body.

Like many talented but lost young women, Dunham took misguided refuge in the company of unimpressive and perverted men. The problem is, as so often happens, that no amount of plaudits or praise could derail the younger Dunham’s catastrophic lack of self-esteem so that she finds herself asking sewer-dwelling dudes to “slap me. Choke me. Punch me. Show me I’m nothing.” Never one to sugarcoat things, Dunham now seems to recognize these episodes for what they are — dangerous, dehumanizing and fruitless; she seems to want to warn today’s girls, who are in all likelihood also being “tied up with belts in Flatbush”, that there is nothing dignifying about pandering to pointless men. 

But that old compulsion runs deeper than just sex. The memoir’s revelations of masochism, coupled with her defiant TV nudity and borderline incontinence when it comes to controversial public declarations, reveal that Dunham’s public and erotic instinct seems to be to show more in every sense, “as if revealing myself down to the guts” would change a lover’s, a viewer’s or the public’s mind about her. In the years since, the tortured self-absorption which once set Dunham apart has become universal: today, social media and dating apps have turned every young woman into a Lena-slash-Hannah. Fourteen years on from Girls’s debut, submitting to sadism in casual-sex encounters is as unremarkable as a kiss on the cheek, while Substacking about it afterwards is as routine as a post-shag shower. Turning 40 next month, Dunham — with her romantic recklessness and frightening honesty — embodies the psychic cost of thinking too much about how everyone else, and especially men, sees her. 

And as the dating-Substack narcissists of 2026 will surely soon discover, none of this introspection makes life any easier. Dunham can’t stay off social media, obsessively reading hate comments; she can’t be friends with a co-star (Adam Driver, who was crucially in a relationship throughout Girls) without torturing herself that he might see her as “a mother? A boss? A girl? Fuckable? Unfuckable? Irritating? Brilliant?” How exhausting it must be to constantly monitor your image through the eyes of others; paging Berger! She cops to the “sort of blithe slutty persona” that goes with her campaigning work for Planned Parenthood and Obama, but there is nothing blithe about it: always ravenous for press coverage, she is repeatedly blown to bits by headlines like “Has Lena Dunham Finally Hung Herself?” (It’s hard to think of another actor or writer about whom something so vicious could be signed off.) The imagined audience of awed women and furious men bore down on Dunham’s private life and body more than any other because she was at points annoying, yes, but always annoyingly good.

Lena Dunham’s troubled relationship with her body sees her compare herself with female peers with an undeniably competitive prurience. The women in her memoir burst out of bikinis or “fill out … ’70s Levi’s”; they are “stunningly petite brunettes” or have “pert little breasts” or “would have looked … at home … at a modeling contest in the Winnetka Shopping Center” (this latter, somewhat catty, remark was reserved for Driver’s long-term and patently resented partner). It seems that Dunham handles her discomfort at being so viciously picked over by the media — including in articles where “it was noted that I walked in heels like a baby giraffe, that I should have had the money by now to fix my teeth, that I wasn’t as ugly as everyone said, that I was uglier” — by training her own lens obsessively on other women. Nor is her paranoid surveillance unjustified, if the many references to her long-term boyfriend Jack Antonoff’s ambiguously close working relationship (“always behind a locked door”) with “the teen pop star” who “called me ‘Aunt Lena’” — Lorde, probably — are taken into account. 

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Then there are the darker storms weathered: the twin “cancellation” events which will be the most hungrily awaited by social media. First, the firestorm which followed her 2014 memoir’s revelation of childhood curiosity about her baby sister’s body — a story that never should have made it to print but was nonetheless ungenerously interpreted by detractors as a confession of sexual abuse. She judges — rightly, in my view — that the furor was mostly an opportunity for anonymous commenters “to eradicate someone who had heretofore been only a nuisance to them”; in this sense it was a classic piece of 2010s Thermidorian Reaction offense-archivism. 

The second cancellation is the more existential: a monumental betrayal of her own feminist credentials in the form of a 2017 statement defending Girls writer Murray Miller against rape accusations based on “insider knowledge” which she subsequently denied having. (Miller always denied the allegations, and no charge was brought). Dunham places the statement in the not-quite-explanatory context of post-surgery fug and the aforementioned love-hate relationship with her producer Jenni Konner, who co-signed it. It doesn’t help that she keeps referring to it as “the Big Bad … which I had experienced as a rupture of self”. Given how sensitively she describes her own sexual traumas, Dunham would do well to extend that tact to others — even if this means letting someone else pull focus.

As Dunham chronicles, her fame makes her writing a perpetual work of collective annotation: Dunham, the fans, the media and the haters, locked in an endless loop of interpretation. It is a system in which the project of “making our mind up about Lena Dunham” is never finished — she is an endlessly mixed-up woman refracted through endlessly fickle readers. Her legacy is not just profound honesty about what “girls” can expect from the world, but the bleakest biography of the Internet Age: the girl who held up a mirror to a certain generation became its most hunted target. Impulsive, compulsive and insecure, this exceptional talent was able to show Millennials the worst parts of themselves. When they didn’t like what they saw, they tore chunks again and again. Yet despite their best attempts to cancel and shame, it looks like this juggernaut will keep pushing. After all, Dunham is a better writer than most of her critics put together — trying to humiliate her is useless, for doing exactly that has been her life’s great work.

Olivia Nuzzi, the former New York Magazine political correspondent-turned-social pariah, launched her career at about the same time. Of this personal essay industrial complex, she writes: “I could not participate because I did not care to write of my own life and experiences because I did not find any of it terribly interesting and certainly not more interesting than whatever I might learn about the world from other people and their experiences.”

The above passage appears early on in Nuzzi’s new book, American Canto, and let me be the first to say: it’s true. She could never have participated in this particular literary trend, and I know this not just because she said so, but because American Canto — or parts of it, anyway — reveals what happens when she tries. The result is cacophonous: mixed metaphors, run-on sentences, insights intended to come off as confessional or vulnerable that instead read as solipsistic bordering on delusional.

Well, she did warn us.

For those not in the know — or not in the media, where this story has played out over the past weeks like something between a soap opera and a trainwreck — the controversy surrounding Nuzzi dates to just over a year ago, when rumors began to circulate that she’d been involved in a long-distance sexual entanglement with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who she had profiled for New York some months before. That the affair was allegedly never consummated was a bizarre twist, but one that paradoxically made the whole thing seem more, not less, sordid, not least because it conjured images of RFK hiding in a closet somewhere in the Hyannis Port Kennedy compound, clutching a smartphone in one meaty hand, whispering dirty little nothings in that voice.

Nuzzi was suspended and then fired from New York for the ethical breach, whose revelation she blamed on her then-fiancé Ryan Lizza; around the same time, she filed for a protective order that accused Lizza of threats, stalking and hacking her personal devices in order to blackmail her. Lizza denied these charges, and Nuzzi eventually withdrew her petition. Then, she disappeared.

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For a while, at least. When she resurfaced again nearly a year later, it was as the new West Coast Editor at Vanity Fair — and with a surprise book deal. A memoir, written in secret, about the series of events that led to her downfall.

The controversy surrounding Nuzzi’s return to the media has been even more messy than the one that surrounded her ouster. The release of American Canto, which dropped 2 December, is messier still. The book was preceded by one week with a sensational excerpt in Vanity Fair, which was in turn immediately eclipsed by the counter-publication of a florid, multi-part series on Ryan Lizza’s Substack featuring previously-unknown details of Nuzzi’s misdeeds. The first installment, titled “How I Found Out”, ended with the shocking allegation that Nuzzi had also had an affair with a certain governor known for philandering, hiking, and lying about hiking when he was actually philandering.

The second, which reproduced various correspondences between Nuzzi and RFK, Jr., was basically highbrow revenge porn. (Lizza may or may not have tried to actually blackmail his former fiancée, but he’s definitely not beating the charges of having dug through her phone in search of the kind of material one might use to do this.)

At this point, the only character in this saga who has yet to weigh in is RFK, Jr. — perhaps because he’s busy doing other things, or perhaps because the only good response to having your terrible filthy poetry published to a global audience is no response at all.

But then, nobody seems to care what Kennedy thinks of all this. The vast majority of the opprobrium, maybe even all of it, has been reserved for Nuzzi. The consensus seems to be that this is a story about a woman doing a bad thing — and that the idea that the men in it might have been active players, too, is ridiculous and impossible. The consensus also seems to be that if you’re willing to admit Nuzzi had some power in this equation, you might as well go ahead and insist that she had all of it. And having identified her as the sole architect of this entire drama, the discourse then turns to outrage: how dare she do this! And worse, having done it, how dare she write a book about it!

The thing is, arguably, she didn’t. Write a book about it, I mean. Whatever American Canto is, it is not a tell-all memoir, a notion the author explicitly balks at. “When your privacy is violated, there emerges the expectation that you must respond by further violating it. I thought of that phrase, Tell all, often over the months that followed. Tell what, exactly? Tell why, exactly?” she writes. “I could tell you the facts. I could tell you the truth. I could tell you that where facts end, truth begins. I could tell you, probably, nothing that you would like. I could tell you, almost certainly, nothing that would redeem me.”

In fairness, the outrage surrounding American Canto is a valid response to the book’s Nuzzi-tells-all marketing, including in that much-discussed Vanity Fair excerpt — which is actually not an excerpt at all, but rather a series of disparate passages cobbled together to sell a sort of alternate-universe version of the story, like one of those goofy trailers that recut Mrs. Doubtfire to look like a horror film. These are the weakest, worst-written parts of the book.

Unfortunately they’re also the only parts most people have read.

That includes critics, many of whom rushed to publish their takes on American Canto based only on the excerpt, rather than the full text. The upshot is that a substantial portion of the critical response to American Canto amounts to lamenting the shortcomings of a book Nuzzi didn’t write, and had no intention of writing.

At the same time, to expect anyone to engage generously with this book was always a losing bet. For most people, any insights American Canto might have offered are nullified by the loathsomeness of its author, which is to say, people hate Nuzzi so much that she could be the second coming of Joan Didion, and she’d still get panned.

Of course, she’s also not the second coming of Joan Didion, at least not in this iteration. Perhaps there’s a version of this book that with the benefit of more time and more editing would have approached the sublime. But the book Nuzzi did produce was reportedly written both in secret and in haste, on an iPhone, and it shows.

And yet: what also shows, albeit much too fleetingly for a work of this length, is the same skillful prose styling and uncanny instincts that made Nuzzi a star to begin with, and which the landscape of American political journalism is poorer without.

Critics have scoffed at the notion, articulated in the book’s introduction, that this story is about more than its author’s ill-considered sexual choices: that it’s about America, and Donald Trump, and how the latter irrevocably and forever altered the former. But it’s Trump, not Kennedy, who dominates this narrative, who is the only person in Nuzzi’s cast of characters who is identified by name. It occurred to me more than once while reading that maybe the protagonist of this story is actually Trump, not Nuzzi. If nothing else, she certainly seems to understand him far better than she understands herself.

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That understanding is a valuable thing. Unfortunately, if understandably, it’s also a thing Nuzzi is no longer trusted to do. She’s simply too easy to slot into the archetype of the Unreliable Narrator, with a side of Machiavellian Slut for good measure, even though — and this is what makes American Canto less a memoir than a tragedy — she doesn’t actually fit that role. The whole reason this scandal is a scandal is that what Nuzzi did was so unstrategic, so stupid; it was a baffling act of self-sabotage where the consequences were potentially catastrophic and the upside was nonexistent. She had nothing to gain, and everything to lose.

But she did it anyway. There’s a group of people, about 50% of the population, who are understood as particularly prone to this sort of recklessness — which is why it’s often referred to, pardon the expression, as “thinking with your dick”. But Nuzzi doesn’t have that particular body part, which raises the question of not just how best to describe her behavior, but whether we might be unfairly ascribing to the penis an impulse that actually lives somewhere else. In the veins; in the heart; in the battle between good judgment and desperate desire that characterizes so much of the human experience. It’s not so much there but for the grace of god go we all. Most people never even have the opportunity to blow up their lives à la Nuzzi, and those who do mostly don’t take it, and that is for the best.

But if the specific object of Nuzzi’s life-immolating sexual obsession is neither universal nor relatable, its broad contours are. Who among us hasn’t desired someone we couldn’t have, or shouldn’t have; who among us hasn’t been driven so mad by that desire that we make ourselves look like idiots, if not to a national audience, then certainly to anyone close enough to the situation to see it for what it is. We know how that feels: foolish. Familiar. Maybe too familiar. Boring, even.

And if American Canto is meant to be received as a memoir, this is where it fails. It’s not a tell-all. It’s not a tell-nothing. It’s just that what it does tell us, when it comes to love as an instrument of destruction, is a story we already know.

Plowing through the early sections of the book, I started to understand the worry. There is certainly a startling mismatch between the former first minister’s famed communicative abilities and the descriptions on the page. For instance, if there’s one thing our author wants you to know, it’s that she loves books. The point comes up time and again: as a child, she was “bookish”; “rarely had her nose out of a book”; had a “fascination with words”. Early on, she became “immersed” in Jane Austen, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott. Later in life, no doubt thanks to all that reading, she describes herself as having the power “to communicate in a way that engaged both heart and head” and to understand “the importance in politics of telling a compelling story”.

But why, then, are her anecdotes from her childhood so plodding and banal? That time when she went to the “retail metropolis of Ayrshire” (i.e. Ayr), and her parents wouldn’t buy her a coveted Cilla Black record, but then… her grandad bought it for her instead. That time when her teenage boyfriend Sparky broke up with her: “it’s not impossible that in different circumstances we would have ended up together. Whether we would have lasted is another matter.” Even seismic events become comically flatfooted in her retelling: “It was from Uncle Dave that I first learned about death. He was thrown from a horse and killed during the annual Laminar (sic) Day celebrations in his hometown of Lanark.” So peremptorily and colorlessly does she rattle through various friends and acquaintances, it is as if she is ticking them off from a list.

An optimistic reader might suspect she is getting the boring stuff out of the way so she can get to the moment when life properly began: the fateful day when, aged 16, she knocked on the door of her local SNP candidate’s house and offered to help with canvassing. But even during the sections recounting her formative years as a political operator in a then up-and-coming party, narrative excitement remains elusive. For instance, the highlight of the 1989 Glasgow Central by-election, as far as she can recall, was a nightly “protest” — quotation marks hers — waged with her pal Shona against sexist bartenders at the Laurieston pub. “Every night after campaigning, we would perch ourselves on bar stools and loudly demand to be served, usually to no avail, leaving us to drink pints bought for us by our male friends instead”. Compared to this, Theresa May’s “running through fields of wheat” admission starts to look like glamorous juvenile delinquency.

Still, by the time we get to the heart of the story — that is, an allegedly unguarded recounting of the period between becoming deputy first minister in 2007 and her eventual resignation as premier in 2023 — there is some evidence that reading Robert Louis Stevenson has left its mark, however unconsciously. For a bit like Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, there appear to be two different people battling within the breast of this book’s protagonist. Indeed, Sturgeon is sometimes herself aware of the tension: as when, in a climactic moment just after she has been made first minister, she describes listening to conference applause, and feeling “a sort of dissociation” between “the shy, dour, always self-doubting, frumpy girl… in the wings” and the “confident, articulate, almost stylish version of herself… [on] the stage”. Along with some readers perhaps, she wonders: “Who is that woman? Is she real?”

There are other, less self-flattering, dissociations evident in the book too. Its narrator keeps implying she is good at empathy and warmth; that she has been able to forge a “deep, almost emotional, connection… with a sizable swathe of the Scottish population”. Certainly, that is her public reputation. But warmth is in the showing not the saying, and there is little on show here; only robotic expressions of sadness and shock at various significant deaths and tragic events, before getting onto the more important business of how they might affect ongoing political maneuverings. Similarly, the official version of Sturgeon is admirably high-minded and principled, and particularly on behalf of women and girls. Constantly monitoring for the potential presence of misogyny, she can’t describe accepting a bunch of flowers from Govan trade union officials without noting “a touch of unconscious sexism in the gesture”. Yet at another point, she ruthlessly criticizes Labour leader Jack McConnell for having eschewed cheap sexist vibes and treated her with respect instead, describing his personal kindness to her as “naïve politics” and a “huge tactical error”.

Another mystery is why Sturgeon is a nationalist at all. Her main reflections on the question are that in 1987, when she first joined the SNP, the party was more of a natural home for her youthful socialist politics than Neil Kinnock’s Labour. Given the strength of social conservatism in the party back then, this is implausible; but more importantly, it is also underwhelming as a justification of her life’s work. Where are the traditional tartan romances, the misty-eyed misty glens, even just some memorized lines from Braveheart?

Her avowed heartfelt desire for Scottish independence is certainly not due to any deep knowledge of her country’s history: the occasional forays into this territory sound heavily mined from Wikipedia. It doesn’t seem to be informed by political theory either: there are no detailed discussions of the ideals of democracy or sovereignty here. It is clear Sturgeon loves Scotland; who could doubt it, faced with a sentence like: “Standing on the shore, looking out at Ailsa Craig — the uninhabited island about sixteen kilometers west of the mainland, home to puffins and gannets, and from which microgranite is quarried to make curling stones — still gives me a sense of peace and tranquility that I don’t find elsewhere”? But still, as she occasionally acknowledges rather grudgingly, many Unionists love their country too.

In Stevenson’s novella, Mr Hyde kills an elder father figure; and in a way Sturgeon does the same. The passages describing her complex relationship with Alex Salmond are among the book’s most engaging, though bound to infuriate his supporters. Whatever the truth of her involvement in the investigations he faced for alleged sexual misconduct (he was eventually cleared of all charges) — she says she had none — it is clear that she had to get out from under the charismatic politician’s spell to become the leader she did.

She owed much of her initial success to him, and she knew it: he plucked her from the crowd to serve as his deputy, which led seamlessly to her becoming first minister after he resigned. At the same time, he was everything she was not — a witty, risk-taking gambler, big on charm and low on detail — and the fact obviously annoyed her intensely. Her infuriated tale of writing a crucial White Paper during the highly pressured referendum period, then fielding a phone call from her boss at the racecourse, tipsily promising he would definitely read it before the big launch, will resonate with every i-dotting, t-crossing female employee ever faced with a slipshod superior.

Sturgeon’s own approach was very different: obsessing over minutiae, micromanaging underlings, staying up all night fretting nauseously about how things might go wrong. This seems to have worked well during her time as health secretary: when she was set clear objectives, she was all over her brief (at least, as she tells it). But once put in charge of overall goal-setting as first minister, she seems to flounder. Unable to bring about a second independence referendum, and apparently devoid of concrete ideas to deal with Scotland’s overwhelming social problems, she adopts a generic, vibes-based playbook and hopes for the best: some renewable energy and child welfare here, a bit of gender reform there, free university tuition fees all round. When Covid hits and she is able to return to full technocrat mode, you can sense her relief, even if the huge responsibility nearly breaks her.

But here, too, there are significant omissions. Despite her professed concern for children stuck in poverty, she offers no reflections about how lockdowns might have grievously affected them, making a bad situation even worse; nor about how social isolation might have led to a generation of unhappy teenagers falling deeper into an online world. And speaking of which: in the end, the gender reform thing didn’t work out so well either, indicating another puzzling split in the Sturgeon psyche.

Early on in the book, she tells readers, perfectly accurately, that “building common ground isn’t possible without compromise” and that “it is always a good idea to know your audience”. Yet in practice, Sturgeon plowed ahead obtusely with plans to reform gender recognition processes along self-identification lines, deaf to reasonable objections, and blind to the way her stance would be perceived by ordinary voters. By the end of the book, discussing the fallout from the Isla Bryson scandal — which saw a rapist heading to a female prison because he said he belonged there — the bad-tempered, stubborn version of Sturgeon seems to have vanquished the more politically astute one. Through gritted teeth, she attempts to admit to her own mistakes in this area, suggesting she should have “hit the pause button” on gender reform in order to develop consensus; but she still can’t help monstering her opponents at every turn. They are on the same side as Orbán, Putin, Trump; they stand alongside “raging homophobes”; they deny such facts with “brittle defensiveness” and “howls of outrage”.

Meanwhile, her attempted justification of her own position on the nature of womanhood is made even funnier by the fact she thinks it is “too technical” for people to properly understand: namely (drumroll) “there is no need for a man to claim to be a woman to commit acts of abuse or sexual assault” because “the threat to women comes from predatory, abusive and misogynistic men, not from trans women”. In other words, her new, post-Bryson assumption seems to be that, as soon as a trans-identified man becomes predatory or abusive, “she” ceases to be a woman — QED. Indeed, in a recent interview she has said that a rapist “probably forfeits the right to be the gender of their choice”. Ironically, this is a case of what is known as a “no true Scotsman” fallacy: the circular idea that “no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” isn’t falsified by the sight of Hamish from Glasgow wielding the sugar spoon over his oats; because all this really shows is that Hamish from Glasgow is not a true Scotsman after all.

There was a time just after the 2015 general election, now hard to picture, when the wider world went mad for the progressive vibes Sturgeon was emitting, her party having just wiped Labour out north of the border. For a while, the first minister was mobbed and fawned over like a “rockstar” (her words) wherever she went — including by journalists in London. But looking back, it seems the whole thing was a comparison-based trick of the light: she looked more organized than Salmond, more authentic than Cameron, more effective than Miliband, more down-to-earth than Corbyn. Things got even easier for her in this respect when chaos merchants Johnson and Trump arrived.

But while she had diligence in spades, ultimately, she never made a dent in the most pressing national problems — rising drug deaths, falling education standards, terrible public health, violent crime in cities — and that’s partly because, in terms of her capacity to understand the bigger picture, her intellect was always too limited, tempting her towards the superficial gesture as a substitute. If Frankly is anything to go by, then, strictly speaking Sturgeon never did have imposter syndrome. To have that particular malaise, your nagging suspicion you aren’t really up to the task has to be wrong.

The bizarre details of the crime — Kercher was raped, stabbed multiple times, then covered tenderly with a duvet — and the Italian prosecution’s proposal, on no physical evidence, of a Satanic sex ritual orchestrated by Knox, created an international media firestorm that has flared up again with each new legal development. Knox was freed on appeal in 2011 and has been exonerated by Italy’s highest court. But the legal wrangling continues (she has sued to have additional minor convictions overturned), and she remains an object of bizarrely intense public fascination. Her new memoir (she also wrote one shortly after her release) is well-written, persuasive, and genuinely insightful.

It’s also occasionally tone-deaf in a way that seems to expose the reasons the story gripped us so in the first place.

Knox, who was 20 in 2007, has steadfastly maintained her innocence ever since her brief, obscure time in Italian police custody directly after the murder, when she made a series of damaging and incoherent statements that were used against her as a confession. She has always maintained the plausible and evidence-supported theory that Rudy Guede acted alone, and that the Italian police took advantage of her youth and naivety to juice up a salacious case.

Today, she is 37, married, and a mother of two, and lives once again in her hometown of Seattle. She has become a writer, hosts a successful podcast with her husband, the author Christopher Robinson, and is an activist for criminal-justice reform and media ethics. If she was once dangerously naive about her predicament, she is no longer. She explains that her first book, written shortly after her release, was “the story of what Rudy Guede had done to Meredith, and of what the Italian justice system had done to me. It was the story of what happened to me, and it left little room for anything I actually did.” Free is a corrective whose dual mission is to tell her personal story and to defend her right to tell it.

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White, female, American college students from solidly middle-class families haven’t contributed much to prison literature to date. But the combination of Knox’s intelligence and unique situation is a genuine addition to the genre. As she tells it, she arrived in prison so innocent that “it took me a while to realize that the room I was kept in was in fact a cell, my cell…” As the days and months passed and the gears of justice turned (very slowly, provincial-Italian-style), she had the experiences we would expect: she was scared, alone, isolated, and mistreated by the guards and other inmates (who disliked her as the privileged and famous one).

But she also had experiences we don’t expect: when she was allowed out to exercise in a small courtyard, she jogged, did jumping jacks, skipped, and sang at the top of her lungs, anything to feel free. When she was scared and lonely, she would call up a vision of herself as the happy, innocent, tough little girl she once was, and then she would talk to her younger self about their current troubles. Her raw youth pours off the page.

She was aware, even at the time, that much “invisible luxury” set her apart from her fellow prisoners. She had family to support her and visitors at every visiting hour. She didn’t suffer from the combination of trauma, mental health, and addiction that is common among female prisoners. Nonetheless, she was a prisoner, and accepting the situation as it was, especially after her conviction and sentencing to 26 years, helped her survive. The story of a young girl’s slow, painful grasp of the human essentials is powerful: we always have agency; there are things we possess that can’t be taken away; we must accept the life we actually have, and not pine for the one we wish for.

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After four years of incarceration, Knox was freed on appeal and returned to America, only to discover herself in a different kind of prison. She was traumatized from her ordeal, had panic attacks, and found it difficult to reconnect with family and friends. She was — and is — notorious, a public figure and media sensation, a frequent target of hatred and death threats. For defending her innocence, asserting the value of her own story, or even just being OK, she is perceived as denying the awfulness of what happened to Meredith Kercher. The tabloids, especially in England and Italy, continue to distort her every action into something sinister. “Amanda Knox Wears Bizarre Yellow Outfit as She Marries Poet Boyfriend”, ran a Daily Mail headline from 2020. Once again, she faces the challenge of accepting the life she has, trying to make sense of her experience and to make something good out of something terrible.

The middle section of the book explores the social and cultural factors at play in her case, skillfully woven into the events of her life post-release. She was, she theorizes, the first cancellation of the social-media era and the first person to be subject to the kind of prolonged public shaming that has now become commonplace. She was also a victim of prurience, and the virgin-slut narrative, and the time-honored tradition of pitting women against each other. Cultural factors came into play: the Italian investigators couldn’t comprehend her behavior in the days following the murder, and created a narrative of her guilt as a result. The case became not about the facts, but about her character.

I was moved by the book, and went to see Knox in discussion with British journalist Jon Ronson at the Powerhouse Arena in Brooklyn on Wednesday night without lingering doubts about her innocence. I understood why the people who still believe she is guilty, not least the Kercher family’s lawyer, find her ongoing notoriety to be ghoulish.

If you think she did it, Free is very provocative name for a book. And that “extraordinary” from the opening anecdote has a third valence: Knox has had a more extraordinary life than most people because she has benefited, and not just spiritually, from her hardship. She writes books about it; she befriends other famous people (Monica Lewinsky became a pal); she just executive-produced Blue Moon, a Hulu series about the ordeal set in Perugia, expected to debut this year. But I’d been convinced that these perceptions were not her fault, and that she had no moral obligation to cater to them.

And yet a strange thing happened: the longer she talked, the more it seemed possible that this small, cute, physically unimposing, nerdy-chic Seattle mom in platform boots could have done it. To be clear, I don’t believe she really did it. More important, there has never been any evidence that she did. But there is something about her affect and demeanor that gives off the eerie vibe that if any totally unlikely young woman could secretly be a crazed killer, it’s this one. The more she laughed and said how absurd it was, the more I could see why the police were suspicious.

She mentioned some photographs in a particular situation made her look like “a flippant psycho”, cackling at the ridiculousness to a crowd of fans, but that was exactly what she looked like in that moment. She argued that such perceptions are the awful legacy of suspicion, media-distortion, and our dirty minds. Perhaps greater self-knowledge would come in realizing that it is a mysterious quality of hers, unfortunate to be sure, that was visible to Italian investigators, and has been visible in photography since the early days of the case. I suspect it’s the real cause of our unstoppable slippery fascination with her.

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And there are reasons for it. Knox doesn’t quite know how to treat other people. Her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito, for example, has only a minor role in Free, mainly as a person whose life was, unlike hers, permanently derailed by the wrongful accusations. He’s still single, Knox writes. He’s a pariah in Italy, and he’s never been able to get steady work. Someone brought him up at the event, and she retold an anecdote from the book about how sad he was during their meeting in Italy in 2022, when a passer-by mistook her baby for his.

I thought Sollecito would have been unlikely to feel good about himself if he were sitting in the audience. Knox’s right to tell her story suddenly seemed more complicated than it had in the memoir. If you’ve come through an awful catastrophe, with multiple victims including yourself, and your ultimate success highlights your fellow survivor’s failure, do you really have every right in the world to promote it far and wide? There are some situations — many, actually — where we can’t say whatever we want, and this in order to protect the feelings of other people. Or we can, but we’ve chosen ourselves over them, and it’s going to look bad.

There’s also Giuliano Mignini, the prosecutor of Knox’s case, with whom she strikes up an unlikely relationship in the book’s third section. The narrative slows down a bit here, as Knox enters into an endless wrangle with what she wants from the man — which somewhat contradicts her claim to have found peace. Mignini is willing to engage with her and offer her his friendship, but he won’t say he was wrong about her case. Her final epiphany comes from accepting that there is greater value in just forgiving him. It’s true, and it sounds good (and makes her sound good), but she also mocks him in the book and did so again during the event for being more invested in the relationship than she is. At the event, she tacitly agreed with Ronson, her interviewer, that Mignini is a narcissist. Again, I wondered how he would have felt if he were sitting there, and again I doubted Knox for promoting her own virtue at someone else’s expense.

One of the many themes of the case has been Knox’s ordinariness. She fascinates us, supposedly, because what happened to her could happen to anyone. But Free proves in many ways — both its insight and intelligence, and also its odd failures and lack of self-awareness — that she’s never been ordinary.

Ever since, I’ve been thinking about the lived experience of death. I don’t mean the first-hand testimonies of people who have actually died. If Lazarus told his sisters what it was like to be dead, they did not record it. If Jesus ever described the loneliness of the tomb, his words have been forgotten. No, I mean death as experienced by the living, the survivors.

The experience of death was once far more widely shared. Two hundred years ago, around 15% of babies in Britain died before their first birthdays. “Death borders upon our birth and our cradle stands in the grave”, said a 17th-century bishop of Exeter. Childbirth was dangerous for mothers too. And back then, most people in this country died in their own beds at home, with their families watching. If they did not, if they died on Flanders Fields for instance, their deaths were still not private in the main. But now many people reach adulthood without ever seeing a corpse.

I have seen several corpses, but I did not see the dead body of my husband. For complicated reasons to do with autopsies, transport and distance, neither I nor our children saw him until he was in a sealed coffin in the back of a hearse. I put my hand on his coffin as we filed past it on our way out of the crematorium, but I wish now that I had asked for it to be unsealed. Or that we had gone to the mortuary where he was. If you don’t see that the one you loved is really dead, how can you believe it?

My main feelings when he died were disbelief and a stony sort of shock that left me dry-eyed and clear-headed. And then there were weeks and weeks of paperwork and practicalities that left no space at all to think about my unfinished novel. There was only the haunting fear that by writing a death I had brought a real one into existence. My rational self knew that was not true. Fictions are not premonitions, any more than dreams are. But still.

Even when life returned to something close to normal, I could not write the novel. For a while, I thought about writing a memoir instead, a painfully truthful one, about my husband, my grief and anger, and how complicated mourning is. Truth seemed somehow more relevant than fiction; I kept remembering something novelist Rachel Cusk said in an interview: “Once you have suffered sufficiently, the idea of making up John and Jane and having them do things together seems utterly ridiculous.” I made a start on the unvarnished work I had in mind and then abandoned it almost at once. I knew then that I had had more than enough of me.

If I had written and published that memoir, I would have been asking you, the reader, to sympathise with me. Even, perhaps, to identify with my lived experience of grief. Why should you want to do that? My experience is particular but not in any way unique. If, on the other hand, I could write imaginatively enough to transcend the limits of that experience, to widen it, to bring to it the resonances of other lives, other ways of seeing — well, that I felt would be worth doing. I, as the author, would be opening windows for the reader, not beckoning them to follow me into a shuttered room.

Autofiction — fictionalised autobiography that dispenses with the traditional elements of the novel such as character and plot — is arguably the prevailing literary mode of our time. It suits the general demand for self-revelation in life as well as art: in print, on screens, in public, people share the most intimate of details and bare their souls — or seem to. For years, aspiring writers of fiction have been told to “write what you know”, to stick to their own experience and their own boundaries, and by writing their own lives in thin disguise they are demonstrating their obedience to the rule. This is in many ways a good thing. Care must be taken not to trespass clumsily on territories of gender, racial identity, or sexual orientation. But there’s a difference between unacceptable cultural appropriation and creative imagination. That difference can be described as empathy.

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However carefully curated, whatever balance it strikes between “truth” and “story”, auto-fiction requires ego. It says: look at me, even though what you see may actually be a mask. And it implicitly assumes a degree of mutual recognition between writer and reader. It’s a mirror, not a clear window. This can often be immensely valuable. But how, then, can a reader step outside their own personal experience, to feel as Keats felt when he first read Homer: “like some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken”, breathless with anticipation like Cortez’s men, “silent, upon a peak in Darien”? How, indeed, unless writers can still write of lives beyond their own known and confined realities?

Great writers don’t need lived experience to convey emotion. The psychologist Steven Pinker described an experiment in which people listened to an interview with a heroin addict, who was either a real person or an actor. When the listeners were asked to take the addict’s point of view, they became more sympathetic to addicts in general, even when they knew the interviewee was acting. In other words, they did not need to believe the “addict” was sharing a lived experience in order to empathise. We can see this in William Golding’s astonishing novel, The Inheritors, which takes us into the world of the last Neanderthals and shows us how it feels to be on the wrong side of the cusp of change: disempowered, under threat and fearful. He achieved this masterpiece through an empathetic leap across millennia that owes everything to his brilliance as a writer and his understanding of unchanging human nature, but little to his own experience of life in 20th-century England.

As T.S. Eliot said: “What every poet starts from is his own emotions [but then transmutes] his personal and private agonies into something rich and strange, something universal and impersonal.” To me, that’s a counsel of perfection, the highest of aspirations. My husband’s death caused me great grief, but when eventually I could write that grief upon the page, through voices that were those of imagined people who lived centuries ago, I hope I turned it into something shared, something that could strike chords in hearts other than my own.

The Book of Days by Francesca Kay is published by Swift Press.

James Woodforde began his diary on 24 July 1759, the day that he was made a scholar of New College, Oxford. He kept it up until 17 October 1802. He was 19 when he started and 63 when he finally put down his pen. He filled more than 60 volumes with terse observations about his life and the small world around him. You can read selections from these volumes today in various editions, all published under the title The Diary of a Country Parson. Woodforde thought his diary “trifling”. We should be thankful for such trifles today. The Rector of Weston recorded the sights, sounds, tastes, hopes, fears, and irritations of a sunken England.

The diary is more than a historical document. It is one of the most compelling books I have ever read. This is odd, since Woodforde led a sedate life. Born in Somerset in 1740, he went to Winchester and Oxford. He was a curate in the West Country as a young man, before securing the plum living of Weston Longville in 1774, where he lived a bachelor’s life with his niece, Nancy. He died on New Year’s Day 1803. And that was it. The most common line in the diary is “We breakfasted, dined &c. again at home”. Nothing much happens, yet I couldn’t wait to find out what wasn’t going to happen next.

There was little incident, but much to write about. Weather was important. For Woodforde, weather was not something that happened outside. The Norfolk cold was especially given to waltzing in and making itself at home. February 1785 was bad: “the Frost severer than ever in the night as it even froze the Chamber Pots under the Beds” — though December 1798 was worse: “Frost last Night & this Morning & all the Day intense. It froze in every part of the House even in the Kitchen. Milk & Cream tho’ kept in the Kitchen all froze. Meat like blocks of Wood… So severe Weather I think I never felt before.”

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Woodforde’s religion was like the frost: an obvious and unexceptional part of life. If the parson had a rich spiritual existence, he did not record it in the diary. But he attended to his duties with vigour; the pages are full of burials, marriages and Christenings. When the Sunday congregation looked a little sparse, he was at pains to point out that poor weather had prevented many eager parishioners from attending. He made charitable donations and noted down prayers for the recently deceased. Other clergymen in the neighbourhood provided company, and entertained one another with a busy round of weekly dinners.

These dinners and suppers are the first thing a casual reader will notice. Woodforde took a Hobbitish pleasure in recording the fare, an endless procession of meats and desserts designed to honour guests as well as feed them. But it is the booze that makes the greatest impression. Port wine was the tipple of choice, and Woodforde brewed his own beer and mead. Helpful smugglers would augment the parsonage cellar with tubs of rum and gin. There is nothing to suggest that Woodforde drank any more than his contemporaries. His servants were often pissed, and drunken accidents were common. The parson was aware that it was possible to drink too much — he was constantly receiving news that his brother John had, yet again, fallen off his horse in the dead of night. In 1790 he mused that: “I drank but very little Wine Yesterday or to day only 2 or 3 glasses. I used myself before and all last Winter to near a Pint of Port Wine every Day and I now believe did me much harm.” Still, 40 pages later we find the entry: “Busy this morning in bottling off Moonshine.”

Weather, religion, food and wine. These run throughout the diary, and are interesting in themselves. But the real joy of the book comes from the accumulation of tiny details. The names: Tom Cushion, William Crotch, Lady Bacon, Bretingham Scurl, Garthon Spincks. The parson’s quest to dredge and stock the “great Pond” in his garden, and his worry that the turnips will freeze in the fields unless a good snowfall comes soon. The difficulties he had in managing his household, where pregnant maids and drunken boys caused frequent problems. His niece’s complaints about the dreariness of rural Norfolk and his nephew’s dreams of going to sea. The trauma of a botched tooth extraction, the use of a black cat’s tail to cure an inflamed eyelid, and the building torment of gout. A whole world is born from years of tight observation.

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Writers are fascinated by Woodforde. They always ask the same question: why did he bother? “What made him keep it?” asked Ronald Blythe. Virginia Woolf conceded that “for whom he wrote or why he wrote it is impossible to say”. Woodforde might well have agreed. It is clear that the diary began as a simple record of expenditure and, to a lesser degree, personal achievement. Then the channel burst its banks and widened into broad waters. Everything is written as if it were an accounting of the day’s expenditure. This may, in part, explain Woodforde’s quiet success in the 20th century. His private, laconic prose has come of age. Modern writers strain for effects that the parson conjured artlessly in his smoky study.

We are all accidental diarists now. Even if we do not post about the minutiae of our daily lives online, phones and bank cards record much of our activity on any given day. When I put Woodforde down last night, I felt a sense of unease. His life, a life that could be led fully and quietly, is increasingly remote. It is unnerving to be confronted by the loss of so many little things. Not that the parson’s life was perfect. He was often melancholy, especially in his last years, when his family and closest friends began to die and increasing sickness left him a near-invalid. The growing threat of a French invasion filled him with anxiety. Even when he was a young man, there was “a bad boil upon my Posteriors” for every delicious meal enjoyed. And yet I cannot help but wonder what we have given up in exchange for our current world. As Woodforde once wrote: “The present times seem to prognosticate e’er long very alarming circumstances.”

James Frey, author of the bestselling memoir A Million Little Pieces, had been exposed as a fraud. Oprah Winfrey, formerly his biggest champion, was about to confront him live on national television. And she was pissed.

“I’ve struggled with the idea of it,” Frey said, in response to a question about the famous and then-allegedly fallacious scene in his book in which he receives a root canal without anaesthesia. Oprah snapped. “No,” she said, icily. “Not the idea of it. The lie of it.”

Frey, whose book was published in 2003, was the most notorious literary fabulist of the moment, but hardly the only one. The Noughties were rife with fabricators. There was Margaret Seltzer, who had lied about being a biracial gang member in South Central Los Angeles. There was J.T. Leroy, a trans sex worker, drug addict, and author of semi-autobiographical novels — who turned out to be the imaginary alter-ego of a middle-aged woman named Laura Albert. There was Herman Rosenblat, whose Holocaust memoir Angel at the Fence was cancelled when it turned out that, though his story of surviving the Buchenwald concentration camp was true, the improbable tale of the little girl who saved his life by throwing apples over the camp’s barbed wire fence, and later became his wife, was not.

All very different narratives, and yet, with a common thread — one that at the time spurred a fiery debate about memoir as a genre, and the proliferation therein of what could only be described as trauma porn.

Memoir offers all the enticing horror of sexual abuse, of graphic violence, of watching a man strapped down and brutalised by a dentist — while offering the upright reader plausible deniability. He consumes these books not because he finds such things titillating but because he cares. Audiences want to read about pain and suffering, abuse and exploitation; you were supposed to feel bad for the people who had written these books, while also feeling good about how bad you felt.

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When Oprah angrily told James Frey that he had “betrayed millions of readers”, it was this crucial contract he was accused of violating. Because if these stories weren’t true, then the people who were thrilled by them weren’t empaths, but voyeurs.

Today, the collective horror at Frey’s deception feels like the product of a more innocent time, particularly when compared with the muted response to last week’s unmasking of his contemporary equivalent. Comedian and television personality Hasan Minhaj, an alumnus of The Daily Show, built his career on stories of the persecution he had faced as an Indian, Muslim son of immigrants in a post-9/11 America. But as outlined in a devastating report by New Yorker writer Clare Malone, his most popular material contained key omissions and barefaced lies.

The FBI informant who infiltrated Minhaj’s Muslim community and then reported his mosque to the authorities? Minhaj never met him. The hospitalisation of Minhaj’s daughter after someone mailed him an envelope full of a white mystery powder that could have been anthrax? Never happened. And the high school ex-girlfriend who accepted Minhaj’s invitation to prom, only to jilt him on her doorstep for racist reasons while her new (white) date slipped a corsage on her wrist? She had actually turned down Minhaj several days earlier, and this doorstep moment — upon which Minhaj more or less built his career — was a complete fabrication.

Much like Frey, Minhaj’s popularity centred on his suffering. His work was understood to express the crude, unvarnished and sometimes darkly funny truth of what it is like to be a brown-skinned man in a racist America: white liberal audiences treated him as a sort of mascot for the oppressed, while the culturati lauded him for speaking truth to power. Here, as Slate writer Nitish Pahwa puts it, was “an Indian Muslim, hosting his own show, taking the country to task on his terms, terms that had long been absent from the white man–dominated industries of stand-up comedy and late-night TV”.

But things are a little more complicated when the fabricator is telling tales on the stage rather than the page. It is understood that for comedians, the question of truth, as in authenticity, is something separate from what is true, as in accurate. Comedians will do anything for a laugh, lying included, and everybody knows this — even if the precise ethical boundaries of untruth are sometimes the subject of debate, including by comedians themselves. An essay from 2017 by screenwriter and stand-up David Misch, which tackles this very question, includes a prescient little frisson:

“I agree that the idea of authenticity in a stand-up’s persona is bullshit, but subject matter is a different matter — specifically, when a comedian moves from personal observations to cultural critiques. Wouldn’t we feel betrayed if we found out that the political routines of … Samantha Bee, Trevor Noah, and Seth Meyers (now) didn’t reflect their beliefs? Being Muslim-American is central to Hasan Minaj’s identity as a stand-up — wouldn’t we feel differently about him if it turned out he was Baptist?”

Misch presents this as a rhetorical question, and it is — but only because of the kind of comedian Minhaj is, which is to say, the kind who is not particularly funny. Consider the top YouTube result from his Netflix special, Homecoming King, in which he talks about the harassment his family endured after 9/11. There are ripples of laughter here and there, but it’s only when he stops joking and starts preaching — “I have the audacity of equality!” he says — that the audience explodes like they’re at a tent revival.

Of course, this is as intended. Minhaj isn’t a make-you-laugh-til-your-face-hurts comedian; he’s a Daily Show guy, a pundit with a slightly-better-than-average sense of humour, but one that is smug rather than silly. His audience isn’t there to laugh so much as enjoy the sensation of moral authority with a wink and a titter. And while Minhaj’s material works well enough on television, onstage it translates to something that is less stand-up comedy and more performance memoir.

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Here, Minhaj is following in the footsteps of performers such as Hari Kondabolu, John Oliver, Seth Myers, and, of course, Hannah Gadsby, whose Netflix special Nanette was more trauma porn that explicitly scolded its audience for showing up expecting to laugh. Critics at the time suggested that Gadsby had broken some final frontier, effectively severing the connection between comedy and jokes. Maybe laughter had had its moment; maybe what we needed from comedians now was some moral instruction in what isn’t funny. Maybe what we needed was to feel bad — and to feel good about how bad we felt.

Under this new contract, drawn up amid the creeping identitarianism of Trump-era art, it is not hard to see why someone like Minhaj might fall into the trap of not just monetising his trauma, but fabricating it. It is what Jay Caspian Kang called “oppression fantasy”, writing that Minhaj’s fakery represents “another example of how oppression stories — in this case fabricated oppression porn — gets leveraged by upwardly mobile immigrants to mostly advance their careers”.

It is also a familiar dynamic to anyone who remembers the memoir hoaxes of 20 years ago; the type of audience who flocks to see Minhaj today is the same one that made James Frey a bestseller. There is nothing that white educated liberals love more than to slum it in a voyeuristic narrative of someone else’s suffering, all while congratulating themselves on being enlightened enough to appreciate it for the art it is. Inject a bit of racial guilt into the mix, and you’ll dine out for the rest of your life courtesy of the New Yorker tote bag class — at least until one of said magazine’s investigative reporters finds out you’re full of shit.

But today’s trauma merchants are ultimately better off than the hoax memoirists. The days in which audiences responded to lies like this with a sense of outrage and betrayal are over; if anything, the anger today is reserved for the person who interrupts a comfortable narrative with a bunch of pesky facts. Consider what happens, inevitably, whenever some bias-stroking outrage is exposed as a fraud — whether it’s Jussie Smollett, or kids identifying as cats, or a guy allegedly shrieking the N-word at a crowded sporting event. Instead of revising our priors, or even being relieved, we look for ways in which being wrong only goes to show how right we were. So, this story wasn’t true? Ah, well: this country is so racist, or sexist, or full of sexually depraved weirdos who want to secretly turn every kid into a trans-cat, that it could have been true, and that’s just as bad.

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Or, as Hasan Minhaj might put it, it doesn’t matter if the story is fake when it is “emotionally true” — which is to say, when it feels like something that could have happened. Needless to say, some people object to this, not least the woman who politely declined that prom invitation as a teenager: she and her family have been receiving death threats for years thanks to Minhaj’s fabrications, a fact about which the comedian is decidedly cavalier. Maybe this girl didn’t do what he described, he says, and maybe what he described wasn’t done to him — but it had certainly happened sometime, to someone, somewhere: “There are so many other kids who have had a similar sort of doorstep experience.”

No doubt this is true, and not just of kids like Minhaj; when I was 17, a more popular boy took me out on a date, then dropped me back at my house several hours later with the dire warning that I couldn’t tell anyone that we were seeing each other. He simply couldn’t risk the humiliation of his friends knowing he was interested in someone like me. His reasons for this had nothing to do with race and everything to do with high-school social dynamics; if I were telling this story as part of a stand-up routine, perhaps I would have to find a way to make him an antisemite.

But despite the fact that the prom story is emotionally resonant with many a teenage experience, there is still something weird — even, dare I say, appropriative — about claiming to have been a victim of something that didn’t happen, let alone making a living off it. On this front, Minhaj has less in common with the comedian who embellishes a wacky story for laughs, and more in common with the TikToker who scammed her followers out of thousands of dollars to treat a cancer she didn’t have. Minhaj has been dining out for years on that doorstep moment. He published it as an essay in Vanity Fair. He’s spoken about it countless times with reporters, never presenting it as anything but a first-person experience. And while it has become a fixture of his comedy over the years, when Minhaj first debuted this material, it wasn’t actually in a stand-up routine, but at a storytelling competition called The Moth.

It is an interesting institution, The Moth: a sort of open-mic night for anecdotes, a performance memoir showcase. It has just one rule: the story you tell on its stage has to be true.

And yet I worry, too. I worry because selling a book, especially for any kind of decent advance, is a tricky business, and the temptation to be prurient and sensationalist must be considerable. I am a committed enemy of romanticising mental illness, which contributes to the impression that the mentally ill are somehow living deeper, more “intense” lives, rather than more painful ones. I want mental health memoirists to understand their profound responsibility to tell the grubby, sad truth about this life.

But mostly, I envy people who write mental illness memoirs. I envy their memories. They can recall the details of their psychiatric histories; I often can’t. Years have passed, faster and faster, since the major incidents in the history of my condition. For important portions of that history, I was brutally depressed, or grindingly manic, or actively psychotic, conditions not conducive to the formation of lasting memories. I have spent 15 years on and off (though mostly off) memory-destroying medications, and have now been on them for five years straight. And for most of that time I was actively in denial, about all of it, to the point of believing at points that it wasn’t real. I did not tell my siblings, those I was always closest to, for more than a decade after my first diagnosis. Sometimes I’d assert that I was finally on the straight and narrow, finally cured — an assertion that always, always preceded the next ruinous crash.

Some things I remember like they were yesterday. Some I don’t remember at all. When I write about my own mental health history, I write in ellipses and at a Dutch angle — for aesthetics, yes, to satisfy my own standards as a writer, but also because to tell it otherwise would make me feel like a liar. I just don’t trust my memory of some details.

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I have spotted a similar instinct in other mental health memoirs. Girl, Interrupted is imagistic and ruminative, much less a recounting of the day-by-day events of Susanna Kaysen’s commitment to McLean Hospital, and much more a series of pleasantly meandering meditations on the concept of sanity and the self. Kaysen also includes original forms and files from her hospital stay; George Scialabba’s brilliant and haunting How to be Depressed consists of little else.

And then there’s Strangers to Ourselves. It’s not a straightforward memoir but rather a collection of brief vignettes, or case studies, about mental illness, written by Rachel Aviv. Her own story opens the volume. She became anorexic as a six-year-old, barely literate, and mostly unable to define what was happening to her. Aviv leaves unsettled the question of whether she was “really” anorexic — her age and stated motives for not eating complicate the question — and instead contrasts her own condition with those of the older patients around her. By reproducing her own experience of mental illness, Aviv brings a little skin to the game in a text that’s mostly about telling other people’s stories for them.

More important, her personal history segues into Aviv setting the boundaries of her project. The book is about people whose “lives unfold in different eras and cultures, but they also share a setting: the psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience, where language tends to fail”. She explains her holistic approach:

“the book draws not only from conversations with them but from their diaries, letters, unpublished memoirs, poems, and prayers… It’s impossible to go back in time and uncover what baseline feelings existed before a story was told — when a person’s angst and loneliness and disorientation had yet to be given a name and a vessel — but I find myself searching for the gap between people’s experiences and the stories that organise their suffering, sometimes defining the course of their lives.”

This is what I needed, from this book, up front: both information about how these individual stories were compiled and an acknowledgment that we all, as patients, construct truths with the raw material of memories that so often refuse to cohere, and therefore use the textual record to confirm and supplement our stories. In the opening section, she quotes her younger self as writing: “I had some thing that was a siknis its cald anexorea.” I was initially sceptical: it sounds like an adult writing the way they think a child would write. But Aviv later explains that she had dug out her childhood diary. I didn’t need her to do so to make her recollection of her illness more real; it just helps to know that the exact wording came from the page and not her memory.

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Sometimes, texts are all there is to go on. Aviv can’t speak to some of her subjects, such as Ray, a depressive who has been dead for years. Instead, she pulls significantly from his unpublished memoir, which follows his decision to sue a psychiatric facility where he was committed. Ray struggled through psychoanalysis at Chestnut Lodge, where he lived in for long months, only to come later to feel that he had been fooled by a broken paradigm that forbade the use of antidepressants. As Aviv tells it, Ray’s psychiatrist seemed to think of such drugs as a shortcut rather than a cure, and therefore avoided their use.

Aviv tells Ray’s story both for its own sake and to consider the fundamental conflict in late 20th-century psychiatry. The Freudian assumption that all psychiatric conditions could be traced to discrete events in childhood, and cured through excavating these memories in psychoanalysis, dominated American psychiatry for decades. It led a lot of patients to endlessly recite early traumas, without much therapeutic gain. That approach was overtaken by an ascendant hope that new drugs could fix chemical imbalances in the brain and turn psychiatry into a medical field like any other. Now, we appear to have swung back the other way: decades of disappointments in psychopharmacology have inspired many to declare that “there’s no such thing as a chemical imbalance”, which has become an inescapable social media bromide.

What frustrates me is that people seem unable to accept that the interaction between the brain and the mind is extremely complex. That the simplistic not-enough-serotonin theory of depression appears to be wrong does not imply that all neurological explanations are off-limits. We don’t have to yaw constantly between “all brain” and “all mind” explanations. Aviv, thankfully, settles on no pat answers to these questions, instead, simply meditating on them via Ray’s strange story.

Likewise, she uses every case study to examine the nuances of some broader social or economic or political issue. There’s Bapu, a Brahmin-class Indian woman whose religious adherence straddles the line between faith and madness; her story considers the conflict between Western medicine and spiritualism. There’s Naomi, a young black mother whose deepening paranoia compels her to attempt to drown herself and her two young children; her story illustrates how entrenched racism complicates psychiatric care for people of colour. There’s Laura, an affluent young woman who starts taking a cocktail of medications at a young age and finds it very hard to stop; her narrative helps explore the thorny questions of how long patients should stay on drugs. It’s never advisable to draw too deeply from individual stories in analysing societal trends, but the connections Aviv draws to such trends give the book teeth, making it more than merely poignant.

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The final section enables us to consider Aviv’s responsibility to her subjects and the difficulties of telling their stories. It focuses on Hava, an anorexic who Aviv encountered at a young age and whose life she sees as something of a road untraveled, given her own early struggles. Hava appeared to be making clear progress in her life, finding a steady boyfriend and planning for her future; sadly, years of making herself sick had damaged her body’s ability to regulate the reflex, and one night she choked on her own vomit in her sleep. She is one the three people profiled who were dead prior to the completion of the book, but Aviv’s deference to their own words makes their stories seem like memoirs all the same.

Perhaps it’s a sign of solipsism that this book often provoked me to wonder what Aviv would make of my story. I crave the simplicity of having my life printed out in black and white text; I also dread the inevitably reductive nature of such an exercise, and I’m scared of what someone else’s eyes might see in my narrative. For me personally, mysteries abound. I couldn’t possibly tell you the name of the doctor who diagnosed me as bipolar. At the time, I was not conscious in a conventional sense and everything that happened seemed to happen somewhere outside of me, people puttering around and talking in strange language I didn’t understand. There was an ER, there was a shot of haloperidol, and there was a stretch in a grey and muted psychiatric facility. Someone must have written my diagnosis down on a chart. Who that was is known only to God and, I imagine, to some mouldering file somewhere that I have absolutely no interest in digging up.

There are a lot of things I don’t understand about my own history. Worse, I can’t remember if the weight of years, mental illness and medication has simply obscured that knowledge, or if I never knew. In general, my time in the mental health system has been marked by constant confusion; I would feel like a liar if I said, “and then this month, in 2011, this happened”.

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Do the subjects in Strangers to Ourselves struggle the same way? What must it feel like, for those who are still living, to read this book? Aviv tends to avoid the overly literal, rescuing the book from questions of simple authenticity and making it, usefully, a record of how foggy our recollections can be. But I can also imagine readers who might be frustrated by the lack of clear lines between certain truth and imperfect memory. All of us long for order in the stories we read. I think that’s why people gravitate towards mental illness narratives, to clarify something that has been obscured by instability. But how do you faithfully translate what is by its nature not translatable?

I honestly don’t think writers tell lies in mental illness memoirs. I wouldn’t even say they bend the truth. I would suggest, perhaps, that they take the fragments of what they know happened, and through them assert a kind of truth, as part of a therapeutic process. That asserted truth might not look exactly like that of a dispassionate observer — say, one of the many doctors who wander into our lives, speak to us condescendingly, make marks on a chart, and shuffle out of our story. But I can’t see much harm done, when patients tell it themselves. The conceit of a memoir is that other people will be entertained by our misfortune; so long as we tell our stories with integrity, those who suffer through the instability and boredom and deprivation of dignity common to serious mental illness are entitled to our own frames. I only hope that both writers and readers know that the attempt to organise the experience is quixotic and we are narrativising the un-narrativisable. I understand the feeling that we must try anyway.

Aviv, like me, is wary of the way that definition can trap and limit us. In our online culture of mental illness, diagnoses are celebrated: young people wield them like talismans for a sense of validation. And I am not entirely a stranger to the seductive power of becoming one’s diagnosis, letting it become the load-bearing element of your personality. But I am also no stranger to the way that, further down the road, that self-definition becomes cramped and uncomfortable, even horrifying, as you start to want to be something else. (To the newly-diagnosed, I urge you, do not become your illness.) For years I resisted writing anything about my mental illness; now I worry constantly that when I do so, I pigeonhole and limit myself.

“People can feel freed by these stories,” Aviv writes, “but they can also get stuck in them… a role that at first seemed freeing, but it began to destroy them.” This is the most recurrent theme in Strangers to Ourselves: the double-edged sword of the stories we tell to make our disorders comprehensible. Aviv’s is the kind of mental illness narrative I trust and value the most: suspicious of narrative itself. It’s perhaps a kind I could even write myself. The bigger kind, the longer kind, the “and then this happened on this date” kind, is both beyond my abilities and against my best interest. As Aviv writes, “there are stories that save us, and stories that trap us, and in the midst of an illness it can be very hard to know which is which”.

Of course I cared. I’m horrified that people found prejudice and cruelty in my book. And I went into the process willingly: I’ve always enjoyed and benefited from editing and saw this as an extension. I did an initial rewrite — there were many things I was eager to change — in the autumn of 2021 and sent it off full of interest and optimism. I received the reports on it before Christmas. They were never formally used and I share the content here — anonymously, of course — because sensitivity reads are being used more and more widely, and mine gives a valuable insight into how they might work with non-fiction and memoir.

There are several reports — Picador did a thorough job — and they are varied. The novelty of the whole field is reflected in the fact that the Readers use different titles — sensitivity and authenticity — and different methods, too. Some write A4 reports, others use the comment button on Microsoft Word or an Excel sheet, still another presents a simple list of headings, done very possibly with a word search. More than one grades infractions, 1-3. They have of course special areas of expertise — Islam, blackness, disability — but these emerge through inference, not announcement.

Their scopes vary, too. One Reader fusspots around single words: I should not use “disfigure” of a landscape (infraction level 3, as presumably comparing bings — spoil heaps — to boils might be harmful to acne sufferers). Nor should I use “handicap” in its ordinary sense of “impede” (infraction level 2, serious); and I should prefer the acronym “SEN” to its origin phrase, special educational needs, because it is more inclusive (infraction level 2).

Others have grander ambitions: paragraphs, sub-sections and even entire chapters should be revised. Still others focus on issues around the presentation of the book. One suggests the authors of endorsements containing the words “love” and “humanity” might want to “rethink their stance”. To add to the cacophony, the Readers contradict each other freely, even praising and disparaging the same passages.

Given this diversity, it seems reasonable to start with areas of agreement. These mostly occur in the first part of my book, which is set in the Nineties. Perhaps this is because all of the Readers seem to be experts on sexuality and gender, and resisting homophobia is one of my themes. There is even a particular passage, the only one in the book, on which the whole Reader crowd comments and concurs.

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The setting is London, 1992. After end-of-term drinks, a favourite student, Liam, comes out to me and then asks me to take him to G.A.Y — because, he says, no one else in his world would know where it was. I was very worried about doing this at the time; even though Liam had just left school, I still felt like his teacher, and I worry even more now, when teachers no longer take 18-year-olds to the pub and are much more aware of influence and consent.

None of these sensitive issues, though — raised at length in the book — worry the Readers. They are concerned, rather, that I might be boasting about helping a young gay person: “Straight white saviour trope”, suggests Wordsearch List, “could be problematic”. And they set up a chorus about what I feel and say after Liam hits the dance floor and I note:

… a new kind of pain, a physical, chesty anxiety that I was not to experience again until I watched my own children walk along ledges or cross a busy road. What would happen to Liam among all those strong bodies? What would happen to his body? He was too young to understand you only got one. Fortunately, it was only twenty minutes or so before he came back out of the crowd and grasped his beer.

‘Liam,’ I said, ‘I love you. You have to promise me to always use a condom and never get AIDS.’ 

I make, my Readers agree, a “reductive” and “rogue” remark. The preceding passage “comes across as homophobic” and is an LGBTQ infraction Level 2. But in 1992, people were still dying in large numbers from AIDS, and I would have urged all young people to use condoms. Excel Reader is kind enough to acknowledge this — “the author has chosen to reproduce contemporary dialogue which may not … reflect brilliantly on her” — but the other Readers seem to concur that the past should match an idealised present, in the same way that Anne of Green Gables, say, got a gay best friend when she went on Netflix.

There are similar injunctions throughout the text. I am enjoined not to quote from My Ántonia by Willa Cather, as it is “an old novel”; nor to state that homosexuality has historically been taboo in Nepal, as homophobia comes from colonialism; nor to mention that the Taliban were terrorists. Extending the principle of sunny improvement into the present, Wordsearch List breaks out of their list to make the helpful suggestion that I should remove references to terrorism from across the book, as it “over-sensationalises such a heavy topic, especially with minors involved”.

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Nor should I say that more middle-class than working-class children go to university; nor that Foetal Alcohol Syndrome leaves children unable to progress; nor that a long tight dress restricts movement. All of these things are, for my Readers, “hurtful” notions of mine, not unfortunate facts. Writing, they imply, should represent the world as it ought to be, not as it is.

Perhaps this is a reflection of the sensitivity read’s origins in children’s and young adult fiction. There are good reasons for regulating children’s reading: it is foundational and formational and may be enforced by school choice or being read aloud to. It is genuinely important, there, to avoid oppressive stereotypes.

But Some Kids isn’t a novel, nor written for children. Adults are able to put books down if they upset them, so their books may safely contain difficult ideas. I don’t, for example, agree with my Readers that the references to looks, attraction and sexuality in my book should be removed in case readers are hurt by a metaphor as a child might plausibly be. I think adults can endure bings being compared to boils. I also believe that physical human beauty empirically exists, is enormously important for adolescents, and that I can observe its currency and often destructive power, especially for young women, in the classroom. I make an explicit argument about this, which readers may disagree with.

Argument, though, is not a word the Readers use, or even something they seem to think I should be engaging in. “Please avoid generalisations about anyone”, snaps Comment Button Reader from the margins, while Excel Reader trails a noisy stream of alerts, like a lorry reversing, down their squares: “chosen to make the stance/vent the opinion”, “Author gives her view”, “Author stance”.

I find Excel Reader irritating, but at least they acknowledge I am constructing a point of view. Comment Button, on the other hand, thinks I am accidentally misrepresenting the world because I am not aware of my “benevolent racism”. It’s exoticising, they say, when in my section on “Faith” I show a group of young people from diverse cultures and religions discussing the terrorist attacks of Paris 2015. “It is as if these children and their friendships are especially praiseworthy because of their backgrounds, rather than just treating them as people, as “normal” children”. But the young people were behaving in a special way that day: that’s why I wrote about it. I sincerely (Author taking a stance) found hope for humanity in the capacity they demonstrated for forgiveness and communication. I also believe (Author giving her view) that I am entitled to say so.

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Similarly, in my chapter about art and poverty the Readers ignore several pages about history and economics to home in on a conflict between me and a character I named Cheyenne. The chapter is read as pure autobiography: “It’s clear the author did not like this pupil”. It’s “hard on Cheyenne personally”, sighs Excel Reader, “to the point [she] becomes an allegory of poverty”. But Cheyenne is an allegory of intergenerational poverty, a composite carefully constructed from details observed in different people over many years. She is a literary figure, not a person, doing what literary figures do: make abstract ideas visceral and moving.

My Readers though, have not been hired as literary people. They are there to help create a book that would play better on Twitter, not one that is better written. For example, they like my liberal conclusions to chapters so they recommend I put them as introductions. I should eliminate journeys of thought across chapters, ambiguity from paragraphs, and nuance from sentences. Love, they assure me, is never expressed with shadows.

I struggle with all this. I baulk, besides, perhaps snobbishly, at their language: the imprecision of phrases such as “feels like the kind of saying that could be deemed insensitive these days”, or “white knight tone/verve” (verve?). I snarl when Excel helpfully suggests I have made a typo with e. e. cummings, and lost his capital letters. It upsets me in particular, when so many of their criticisms depend on it, that none of the Readers deploy the word “irony”, but use “sarcasm”, “jocular aside” and “subtlety” instead, always as negatives. Comment Button condemns my entire chapter on Prizes as “it shows none of the adults involved in a good light”. Indeed it doesn’t. They are being satirised, even though one of them was me.

Irony, for me, is more than satire, and far more than sarcasm. It is a way of saying that two things can be true at once, of holding comedy and tragedy, romanticism and practicality, grand emotion and self-deprecation, together in a paragraph. Because it contains contradictory elements, irony doesn’t settle. It can keep the tension and life in any sentence: except of course on Twitter, where elements of a sentence can be taken out and caricatured; except in the hands of sensitivity readers, where it dies from granulation. As A4 Report comments: “I sometimes found it difficult to tell when the author was poking fun, and when she was not … if sarcasm is too subtle, all that is left is the bad implications”. They recommend stronger signposting.

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Times change. In 1997, a second edition of my first poetry collection, Slattern, was published with Picador. I was thrilled, and immediately took a copy to show off at a festival in St Andrews. Two poems into reading from it, though, I was startled to discover the words had been changed.

A copy editor had decided my irony, commas, and word-choices were too eccentric, and had taken it upon himself to alter them in several poems. I emailed Picador, and the next morning found myself speaking (on a pay phone) to the legendary Peter Straus, Picador’s Publisher. He noted down each tiny adjustment himself and explained he would be ordering the pulping of the books, the carpeting of the copy editor and the printing of a new edition. He wouldn’t be thanked. He seemed to think this was Picador’s mission: to preserve, within its profit-making superstructure, a space for the miniature nuances of a poet.

A quarter of a century later, publishing had moved on. Philip Gwyn Jones, the new holder of Peter Straus’s position, tweeted: “I now understand I must use my privileged position as a white middle-class gatekeeper with more awareness to promote diversity, equity, inclusivity, as all UK publishing strives to put right decades of structural inequality”. At the same time, one of the sensitivity reads Picador had commissioned was advising that Some Kids “exemplifies why publishing is so unwelcoming to marginalised people”. The Readers were explicit that this was not to do with any actual words on the page, but because they could tell that I personally had not done “the self-reflection and self-education that is necessary to understand the underlying reason that so many people felt harmed by [my] work”. They recommended the book should not be republished.

Before we could discuss this, Picador and I agreed to split. After the announcement was made, Swift Press offered to take on the book. I thought carefully about all the notes I had been given and, in the end, adopted none of the suggestions proffered by the Readers. The Kindle edition of Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me now on sale with Swift is the same one I originally sent to the sensitivity readers for report, and if you want to know more about what caused such deep offence, and seems to exemplify so much about publishing, I suggest you read it.

I googled this so you don’t have to (and so suffer the consequences, in the form of bizarre targeted advertisements). It turns out that men don’t write much about their bodies at all, and when they do, they keep it above the neck. Their memoirs focus on matters of the mind: mental illness, drug addiction, alcoholism, even a lobotomy. (Okay, Mark Wahlberg did dedicate his book to his penis, but that doesn’t count.)

It makes a sort of sense. Despite their anxieties about pattern baldness and matters of size — as in, does size matter? — society has always valued men for their minds at least as much as their bodies. If a man’s head is filled with great ideas, his ability to fill out a tight t-shirt hardly matters.

It’s different for women, and the body memoir is a genre in which they dominate. Beauty standards have always been a pressure point in women’s lives, but the waning days of second-wave feminism plus the dawn of the internet — and the confessional style of writing that proliferated there — led to a glut of literary oversharing as women turned their body issues into book deals. At their best, these books were brilliant: Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Judith Moore’s Fat Girl, Roxane Gay’s Hunger. The female reproductive system was a rich vein of inspiration unto itself, as shelves filled up with pregnancy, infertility, or menopause memoirs. Stagings of The Vagina Monologues became a regular event.

These books are like written dispatches from an endless, unwinnable war, a running tally of fleshy mortification. A woman’s body is both battleground to be defended and enemy territory, friend and foe. We try to torture it into submission, to make it an acceptable shape and size — a paradoxical fight we win by losing, whether it’s weight or our inhibitions about it. Women reclaimed their bodies by writing about them, asserting their right to take up physical space. And not just a sliver: a lot of space. Size XXL, double D, skin-for-miles space.

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Leslie Lehr’s new memoir, A Boob’s Life, feels like a time-travelling artifact from this golden age of women’s writing. Frank and feminist, it’s one woman’s account of living her best (breast) life. By 2021 standards, it’s already a huge success: an announcement came in February that Salma Hayek would be developing the book into an HBO series in which a woman’s life “gets turned upside down when her boobs start talking to her”. But the book itself features no talking teats. It’s not really about boobs; they’re just the framework, the structure, the foundation garment that shapes the narrative. Lehr goes from wanting breasts, to getting them, to getting implants, to getting cancer. She gets angry. She gets perspective.

Many parts of A Boob’s Life read like a throwback to the early aughts — when the rise of plastic surgery reality shows, digital airbrushing, and newly ubiquitous internet porn had unleashed a new and particularly punishing standard to which women were supposed to aspire: a state of hairless, poreless, plastic perfection. In this era of the obligatory Brazilian wax, a woman could write in gritty confessional detail about her body and be considered brave for doing so. And had it been released just ten years earlier, A Boob’s Life would have been seen as radical and empowering — a much-needed rejoinder in a culture that celebrated boobs but hated women.

The days of raunch culture and lad mags are just far enough behind us that we’ve all developed a collective amnesia about how out-there some of it actually was, especially in a world where everything before 2016 is often dismissed as equally problematic. We forget that before Jimmy Kimmel claimed the mantle of moral authority in late-night comedian’s clothing, he was the co-host of The Man Show, in which one of the regular segments featured slow-motion footage of big-breasted women (lovingly nicknamed “the Juggies”) jumping on trampolines. When a mainstream, primetime TV programme thought that the spectacle of a woman getting slapped in the face by her own boobs was the height of comedy, we could in fact have done with a reminder that the boobs had a woman attached to them.

This is the era of American culture at which A Boob’s Life takes aim (hence the subtitle: How America’s Obsession Shaped Me―and You), but it’s just a little too late — like thinking of the perfect cutting rejoinder to an insult when the person who insulted you has not only left the room but also been dead for years. We’ve moved on, not just from turn-of-the-century raunch, but also from the blowback to it. The time for the body memoir is over; the confessional has been replaced by the political.

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The conversation about women’s bodies has become strange and stilted. Talking frankly about things like boobs or vaginas used to be a riposte to the prudery of American social conservatism; now women are being shushed from both sides of the aisle, and occasionally from inside their own metaphorical house. Twitter tampon advertisements devolve into a mess of 240-character feminist infighting about the acceptability of referring to users as “menstruators”. Planned Parenthood has issued a series of mindblowing apologies — including for focusing “too narrowly on ‘women’s health’.” The organisation’s entire reason for being — its unapologetic commitment to women and their bodies and their ability to care for them — was transformed overnight into an embarrassment, hopelessly out of touch with what really matters.

“We must take up less space, and lend more support. And we must put our time, energy, and resources into fights that advance an agenda other than our own,” wrote Planned Parenthood president and chief executive Alexis McGill Johnson.

Once, women bravely fought for the right to live bigger, to be bigger, to take up as much space as we deserved; now, apparently, the feminist position is to be as unobtrusive as possible. In 2008, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler declared that “Bitches get stuff done!” and were met with a wave of roaring approval. In 2021, an assertive woman is just another manager-calling Karen, centring herself at the expense of everyone else. Leaning in is out. Empowerment has been replaced by abnegation. The head of one of the country’s most historic feminist institutions now instructs women to take up less space, and lend more support. Like a bra. Or a folding step stool.

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One gets the sense that A Boob’s Life knows it is arriving into a hostile landscape. It’s trying to negotiate the contemporary, complex and evolving attitude toward women and their bodies by leaning into a very particular brand of pink-pussy-hat-wearing feminist outrage (even as those hats, and the vaginal double entendre they represent, have themselves come to be seen as the totem of the embarrassing basic white woman).

Perhaps anticipating the calls to sit down, shut up, and stop taking up space, the book periodically tries to dress itself up as something more, something bigger and more political than just a memoir about one woman’s life (and breasts). Lehr offers historical sidebars and bulleted lists to contextualise America’s purported breast obsession: a list of actresses who have bared their breasts onscreen, a timeline of lingerie-based trivia, a loose history of cheerleading as a microcosm for women’s oppression. The 2016 election looms especially large, as Lehr attempts to connect her father’s vote for Donald Trump to his various failings as a parent and husband, all of which is connected (somehow) to her complicated relationship with her own womanhood. One remarkable passage takes an earlier anecdote about a happy childhood moment in which Dad taught her to dive for her lifeguard training certification, and recasts it as something sinister and symbolic.

“He taught me I could do whatever I set my mind to, as long as I worked hard,” Lehr writes. “Now I understood that when he hung me by the ankles and dropped me off the high dive all those years ago, it was a baptism into the deep pool of patriarchy.”

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But despite Lehr’s best efforts and colorful phrasing (a baptism! In the deep pool of patriarchy!), the historical sidebars and rhetorical flourishes about privilege, white men and patriarchy only weaken the narrative, vainly attempting to politicise the personal. The strength of a memoir is in the specificity of it, in the intimacy. To position A Boob’s Life as a feminist polemic is a defensive crouch that unwittingly undermines its appeal — but the fact that the author felt it necessary is also revealing.

The great awokening in American culture is supposed to represent the apex of progressive enlightenment, and yet the rules that dictate how a woman should speak, write, be, are stricter than ever. What are we to make of an era where a woman can’t write frankly about her body without endless apologies, caveats, privilege acknowledgments, and permission-seeking?

In this way, it seems that feminist progress has taken us for a long walk around the same well-trodden circle. But until we come around again to being unembarrassed about asserting our right to take up space, authors like Lehr will find ways to adapt, shaping their work to the demands of the culture just as they shape their bodies according to the current vogue. The truth, as always, is that you can punish your body, politicise it, write about it, make it into a temple or a battlefield or both at once. The biggest question, eternally unanswered — and yet, we try—  is how to live graciously inside of it.

In December 1972, Hunter’s mother Neilia was driving her three children — Beau (“Beautiful”), 3; Hunter (self-explanatory), 2; and Naomi, the baby, to buy a Christmas Tree in Delaware. Her husband Joe, newly elected to the Senate at just 29, was interviewing staff in Washington. Perhaps Neilia, with three children under 3, was exhausted. She ignored a stop sign and crashed into a tractor. Neilia and Naomi died. Beau and Hunter awoke in a hospital room. Their father was sworn into the Senate there. They subsequently lived inside the narrative of Joe’s rise to power. Willingly or not, they were seconded to public service. “Delaware’s residents placed their sorrows and their hopes in a dashing young widower suddenly left with two toddlers,” Hunter writes. “Our survival became a source of state-wide pride”. Delaware “adopted” the children. Gratitude was the only polite response.

But it wasn’t a truthful one. Two things interest me about Hunter’s childhood. The first is that he was, in his words, “practically raised” by his aunt and uncle. He was also “raised on politics like farm kids raised on sweet corn”. So, they were raised by an extended family, or the people of Delaware, or politics. I suspect Joe was so overwhelmed by Neilia’s loss he abandoned his children for office. He took them to the Senate — where they played in the sauna — and to endless public meetings. But is that, really, presence?

He couldn’t save Neilia or Naomi, so he would save America. It isn’t exactly selfishness, but it isn’t exactly sacrifice either. It laid on his children a terrible guilt, for having childish needs. “Beau and I never really grieved the loss of our mother and baby sister,” Hunter writes. “We were almost ashamed to admit to any sadness we might have felt because of how enveloped we were in that familial embrace.” There is withholding in that kind of love. It concealed Joe’s grief, but it concealed him, too.

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Hunter has the misfortune to be surrounded by saints. His father is the anti-Trump. His mother is sanctified by death. His brother Beau was saintly too: he was attorney general of Delaware, scourge of sex offenders, preparing to run for governor in 2016. (If Joe didn’t win the presidency, Beau was next in line, his father’s choice). But Beau died of brain cancer in 2015 and is likewise beyond reproach.

If you are among saints, and you are not like them, what are you? A sinner, and Hunter couldn’t exist without his better half. When Beau dies, he asks himself: “If we weren’t the three of us anymore, what were we?” His father, meanwhile, “sat on his porch for hours and took one call after another from current and former leaders from every hemisphere and every country.” This repression is the family way. Hunter and Beau never asked each other what they remembered about the accident. And here again, “Dad and I never really sat together to have a heart-to-heart, to talk about what we were going through. Words,” he writes, “almost felt risky”.

Instead, emboldened by the public response to his eulogy, he asked his wife Kathleen if he should run for office on the wave of grief and sympathy. (It’s the other family way). She replied: “Are you serious?” After that, “We didn’t say another word to each other for the rest of the ride. Or, really, ever again”. Bereft of both Beau and Kathleen, his addiction took flight.

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The first part of the book deals with his childhood — the enforced gratitude for their privileges and the conditional love of the people of Delaware — and loss of Beau. This part feels stymied. Hunter describes the relationship between the three men like this: “It’s a Biden love story, of course, which means it’s complicated: tragic, humane, emotional, enduring, widely consequential, and ultimately redemptive.” They all talk like this: in broad concepts of love, loss and courage. Do they talk like this in private? They might do. How do they order soup?

There is also a defence of his business dealings in China and Ukraine, which were used to attack his father by his opponents. It’s an across-the-board denial of wrong-doing, too comprehensive and outraged in tone to feel true. But if it isn’t entirely true, he cannot say otherwise. He is, again, constricted by his father’s need for power. (There are no politics in this book at all. It is the most telling blank.)

Only in the second part — when Hunter details his relapses and half-life inside hotels rooms with criminals — is the prose alive. For using is his most vivid life, the only place where he is allowed to be angry at the things that are denied him. His writing on this is raging and horrifying. His description of his relationship with Rhea, a street homeless crack addict who moves in with him, is the best thing in the book: a bizarre and functional marriage, with crack as their beloved child.

Hunter is not long sober, if he is at all. He gave a long interview to the New Yorker in 2019 but reveals here that he was high during every interview. (He has been using, with gaps of varying length, since his father became Vice President; since he ascended to the mountain-top.) I would not comment on a fellow addict’s sobriety, but he is a Biden and therefore public property: I am invited to comment.

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Stop weaponizing suicide

By Tanya Gold

Hunter does not sound well. He still hates the drug dealers he was dependent on, though they were as addicted as he, and with none of his privileges. If he had what recovering addicts call emotional sobriety — or if he were truly a progressive — he would try to understand their behaviour. He married a second time, to Melissa, who had “the exact same eyes as my brother”, after knowing her for a week. He did not thank his first wife Kathleen, who suffered at his hands, in his acknowledgements. His thanks to Melissa, “the love of my life”, feel like whiplash.

And he never tells us what I most want to know as he tells of hotel tabs and hangers-on and profligacy: where did he get the money? There is a seemingly inexhaustible supply for his using. Its source is not divulged.

He is honest, though, about his love affair with his brother’s wife Hallie after Beau’s death. It was a pitiful attempt to reanimate the man they both loved. He wanted, he writes, to be close to Beau’s children: “I was seduced by the idea of providing the same kind of extended family that surrounded Beau and me after we lost our mommy and sister.” It’s a re-imagining of the extended family he was gifted to after the death of his mother, but here it feels explicitly insane.

Joe is the most interesting character in this book, of course, and he is not in this book. He is God on his mountaintop. You cannot be angry with God, though watching God try to operate amid the wreckage of his own distant benevolence is bleakly funny. How would it be if your father the Vice President arrived at your crack house with his security detail to ask: “Are you OK?” It’s a weird question to ask a child you know is using drugs. It invites a positive response, a rescuing. Hunter has none for him. Joe cries once, when Hunter runs away from an intervention: “I don’t know what else to do, I’m so scared, tell me what to do”.

Hunter emerges from this rowdy memoir not as a kind man — look to Beau and Joe for that — but as an angry man destroyed, though guiltily, by the imperatives of those he loves. Joe Biden fused his personal narrative into political success long ago because people are sentimental. It worked for the father. It does not work for the son. Here is the evidence, and in his own hand.