A review by alisonrose711
All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

2.0

This one unfortunately suffered I think from too much authorship and too little editing. I admit to skimming past some pages because they were just getting...boring. There was too much space devoted to two of the subjects - Esther Murphy and Madge Garland - and too little to the third - Mercedes de Acosta. Murphy and Garland were certainly interesting, but the amount of detail and tangential stuff in their sections was unwieldy and made the sections drag. I almost feel like they would have worked better as more tightly written longform essays. The author did a lot of work and it's impressive, but unless you have the same level of intense interest in every little bit of these lives as she does, the book can be a bit of a slog. Still, I did enjoy learning about all three of them. Yay for envelope-pushing, iconoclastic, unconventional women!