Ghost

Ok I have to preface my review with the caveat that I didn't realize who the author was before picking up this book and that I was very predisposed to agree with her given my habit of being critical and suspicious of psychology and psychiatry as industries thanks to both my personal and professional experiences. Even with that in mind it was an underwhelming read, to put it politely.

I have several pages of notes detailing minor issues I had with this book which I am far too lazy to organize in a proper review and this book is, frankly, not worth the effort since it's both lazy and disingenuous.

Shrier puts research (which she always bring up free of actual citations) on the same standing as anecdotes which often sound entirely made up in their excess. Even when I agreed with her (after all a lot of her takes validate certain aspects of my parenting style which I now have to question) I had to cringe at how poorly supported her opinions were. The few times she provides sources to support her assertions they range from dubious (why would The New Yorker be your source regarding the prevalence of teen suicide?) and questionable (let's not talk about considering Peterson as a valid source) to passable but uncited.

She seems to have a strange fixation on Israel and inserting the fact that someone is Jewish in the conversation even when seemingly irrelevant.

Even when she comes close to recognizing that hyper-individualism and the lack of community are a big part of why both parents and children seem to be so miserable, she remains determined to ignore what incentivizes these situations and why individualized action are unlikely to solve them. She also appears to be entirely oblivious to the many ways in which she affirms one thing and its opposite whenever convenient for her arguments.

Ultimately my conclusion regarding this book, in a move that will surprise exactly no one who knows me, is: Citation needed!

I've been sitting with this one for a whole day and I'm still struggling to come up with a decent review, so, here, have a rambling mess and my assurance, for what it is worth, that this collection of essays is far more coherent and intelligent than my review.

This collection made me feel seen, reading it felt like sitting with a friend who just gets it, not that she knows what we need to do to fix it all but she's knows what's up and she can commiserate and she won't think your silly for knowing and spending a lot of time considering the details of your cats' personalities or for the numerous and sometimes contradictory anxieties we all seem to struggle with.

What else does she just get exactly? Well for starter she really gets that quintessential millennial feeling of wanting to be an “old person” now, of wanting to slow down, to tend to our own garden (be it actual or figurative) but also that urge, that itch and urgency of being productive at all times and the contradiction of it all that we can't escape.

She also gets that capitalism is impossible to avoid and impacts every aspect of our lives and relationships no matter how hard we try to be a proverbial island. That the unavoidable influence of capitalism on our lives is lifetimes in the making and that she doesn't need to tiptoe around saying it. I could go on but I think you get the idea.

I received an eARC of this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.