emily horne

This book is an attempt to explain the result of the 2016 Brexit vote that ends up feeling pretty persuasive. A feeling of being hard-done-by after their victory in World War II leads to toxic self-pity which hardened into an anti-European English (not British) nationalism. I did find it quite repetitive at times, and wished that there was more in here on the nearly 50-year experience of the UK's EU membership (the book touches on the beginning of the relationship and of course relentlessly examines the end).

It's remarkable how many reactionary movements are based on an undeniable overdog taking on the sympathy-inspiring underdog position. I think that particular framework will be this book's lasting effect on me.

People throw around the term "digital native" as if it's the province of particular generations (another fake idea), but Lockwood's character here is the ur-digital native, a person whose whole existence is mediated by the Portal's idiom.

As a person who considered herself terminally online for a period of time, and made her living from the vicissitudes of "content creation" before it was tagged with that name, there was a lot to identify with here. The push and pull between the Portal and the Real in the latter half of the book seems to come as a surprise to the protagonist but the rest of us saw it coming and, in my case, were filled with dread.

Perhaps I was misled by the new Carmen Mara Machado foreword, but I found this less chilling than I expected to. There was a lack of ratcheting up of the tension or consequences, when in fact there was instead a sort of tidal feeling, an in, and then inevitably an out.

While there was a lot to find relateable here, there's something uncomfortable about reading the motherhood experience of a woman who is seemingly able to hire help for every stage of her kid's existence (doulas, night nurses, a nanny who GOES ON VACATION with the family???). The most charitable read is that even wealth can't insulate from the privations of early parenting, but one also wonders if this lady would have just lost her mind completely if she'd had to live like the Rest of Us.

This riff on the It's a Wonderful Life concept never strays too far from the expected. There's a certain fun to seeing Nora's alternate lives, but it gets repetitive fast. The author's preoccupation with the relative flatness of her stomach strikes me as a particularly masculine way of gauging the levels of fitness of the versions of Nora. It is, naturally, the experience of motherhood that almost tips her in to an alternate existence.

I'm not qualified to speak to his treatment of her depression, but I was interested in the fact that the character seemed to stop noticing whether her versions were on antidepressants, only to pick that thread up again at the very end. Whether this is purposeful or shoddy editing, who is to say?

frothy as usual, but a little bit, dare I say modern?? towards the hollywood end of Wodehouse.

"Precarity once seemed the fate of the less fortunate. Now it seems that all of our lives are precarious - even when, for the moment, our pockets are lined."

It's hard to ignore the coincidence of reading this three years after the beginning of our own mild apocalypse, albeit one that is more explicable than this one was. I got a vague feeling of the past (2011!) being truly a different country here, apocalypse or no.

A balance of the bleak and the hopeful. The apartment of the name is by times terrifying and welcoming. I had a typical north american reaction to the protagonist leaving her child alone at home to go out drinking! To be clear this was presented as an anomaly and indication of something like a rock bottom for her.