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horfhorfhorf's review against another edition
Perhaps I'll feel like revisiting the winding run-on sentences meant to illustrate the author's train of thought while hurdling through planes of self-doubt. Perhaps.
k8iedid's review against another edition
Tallent's long, dense sentence structure is the perfect format for conveying her torment. Pain oozes off the pages and, as a writer, I could certainly relate to the fear of just getting started. Allow ourselves to be wrong! Make mistakes! Revise, revise, revise. Ugh. While this memoir is painfully honest and beautifully raw, I chose a not-great time to read it and couldn't finish.
jarku's review against another edition
4.0
I've been at my wit's end for, oh, at least two years. Lying supine about two weeks ago I
"How to overcome perfectionism"
"How to overcome perfectionism"
meganpbell's review against another edition
5.0
After an incredibly promising start, publishing 5 critically acclaimed books and nabbing a prestigious professorship at Stanford, Elizabeth Tallent published nothing for 22 years. This memoir is her reckoning with the perfectionism that has both made her and plagued her. What results is a brilliant and enriching examination of the facets and faces of perfectionism through a woman’s life from her very birth to present day.
plantonic_friendships's review against another edition
3.0
It reads like fiction. I don't mean her life sounded fake. I meant that she's clearly attempting to tell a story. Full of literary devices to construct a scene. So involved in constructing beautiful sentences and moments that I completely lost track of anything that was happening. By the end of the book, I realized I didn't comprehend much. Chronology is all over the place. Her ties to perfectionism were so loose. Her ties to anything really... At one point, she started talking about a painting with harlequins. There was... no point. I have no idea why that was significant. Or how she jumped into other topics. Because after that, she's musing about ficus and rugs, still with no conclusion.
cqg's review against another edition
5.0
First book in a long time that I had to go back and reread sentence after sentence—making sure I understood the structure, where the verb was hiding. It is beautiful, a triumph. A meditation on mental illness. A poem dedicated to the fleeting details of identity.
justemilyc's review against another edition
2.0
***Goodreads Giveaway Win***
Now I know what people mean when they say a book seems MFA workshopped. This book was MFA workshopped within an inch of its life. I could tell the writer put in a ton of effort to each sentence; to each word but somewhere she the lost the story. What she arrived at was words that sounded pretty went strung together but made zero sense to the reader.
Now I know what people mean when they say a book seems MFA workshopped. This book was MFA workshopped within an inch of its life. I could tell the writer put in a ton of effort to each sentence; to each word but somewhere she the lost the story. What she arrived at was words that sounded pretty went strung together but made zero sense to the reader.
marcintheoc's review
5.0
This was a difficult read but I'm very glad I read it. Perfectionism is toxic and Elizabeth Tallent does an exceptional job in sharing the difficulties it has caused in her life in addition to her writing. Much of this memoir is exquisitely written, although there are some sections where I found myself lost in very long, complex sentences and had to read a section over several times to get my bearings. I learned quite a bit about myself from reading this and for that I'm grateful. 4 1/2 rounding up to 5 stars.
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