What If This Were Enough?: Essays

👍🏽Pick it: If you find yourself addicted to optimization and dissatisfaction.
👎🏽Skip it: If you can't stomach conviction.

Cultural criticism is often penned from the throne of a writer who removes himself or herself from the dysfunction they judge. Which is perhaps why I have a hard writer crush on Havrilesky.

She does not excuse her participation in our society's obsessive pursuit for the bigger, the better, the next – anything other what we have, who we are in the NOW.

And it's because she writes as someone in the arena, searching out and screwing up, a reader will not feel threatened by her observations, but feel enrolled to deem the present enough.

Each essay can stand and shine on its own. But thread together, it's one of the most-focused collections I've ever read.