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A review by noumi
I'll Tell You in Person by Chloe Caldwell
1.0
I'm not very familiar with personal essays so when I saw this book hoping up in my recommendations and after reading some great review I thought I would pick it up. Now I love reading essays. They basically allow you to learn about not only the experiences of another human being but also about his/her reflection on those experiences. It's basically a condensed answer to the following question "What I've learned from life ". At least that's how I see personal essays and what I want to read about.
I'll admit the title hugely influenced me to buy this book because to me it said " This book is about my life and experiences and what I learned from them". And in a way I guess it was about Chloe caldwell's life. The only problem is I discovered her life was not something I was interested in reading about. I don't mind reading about a boring life I'm not looking for entertainment when I reach for personal essays. I want to learn about what kind of life people live and what they've learned from it. I learned nothing from this. No scratch that, I learned that Chloe felt depressed and miserable most of the time but never really talk about depression and how it made her feel expect that it made her want to sleep all the time and smoke weed. That's basically what she does. She goes to yoga gets addicted to all kind of things have a lot of sex and likes to talks about it, feels depressed and sleepy, is not capable of being responsible knows about her flaws but is too lazy to do anything about it. Likes to complain about how inferior she feels and how she eats too much and is not skinny enough. All in all I didn't mind hearing about somebody who felt miserable if only she would have offered some kind of reflections , structured thoughts on what it is like to feel depressed, insecure, and addicted. She only describes her life and that's it. At one point it really got frustrating and I don't know how I finished the book. I felt forced to judge her when all I wanted was to learn from her. I came to the conclusion that I couldn't stand her as a person. I didn't like the person I was being told about. She was shallow and selfish and a complete jerk. She only cared about herself and complained all the time about what a she failure she was.
I learned nothing meaningful from this book expect that next time I shouldn't let a title and a cover fool me and actually do my own research before buying it.
I'll admit the title hugely influenced me to buy this book because to me it said " This book is about my life and experiences and what I learned from them". And in a way I guess it was about Chloe caldwell's life. The only problem is I discovered her life was not something I was interested in reading about. I don't mind reading about a boring life I'm not looking for entertainment when I reach for personal essays. I want to learn about what kind of life people live and what they've learned from it. I learned nothing from this. No scratch that, I learned that Chloe felt depressed and miserable most of the time but never really talk about depression and how it made her feel expect that it made her want to sleep all the time and smoke weed. That's basically what she does. She goes to yoga gets addicted to all kind of things have a lot of sex and likes to talks about it, feels depressed and sleepy, is not capable of being responsible knows about her flaws but is too lazy to do anything about it. Likes to complain about how inferior she feels and how she eats too much and is not skinny enough. All in all I didn't mind hearing about somebody who felt miserable if only she would have offered some kind of reflections , structured thoughts on what it is like to feel depressed, insecure, and addicted. She only describes her life and that's it. At one point it really got frustrating and I don't know how I finished the book. I felt forced to judge her when all I wanted was to learn from her. I came to the conclusion that I couldn't stand her as a person. I didn't like the person I was being told about. She was shallow and selfish and a complete jerk. She only cared about herself and complained all the time about what a she failure she was.
I learned nothing meaningful from this book expect that next time I shouldn't let a title and a cover fool me and actually do my own research before buying it.