I declared this one of my best reads of 2023, even though I hadn’t quite finished it on December 31. But when I finally did a month later, I had no regrets about the choice. It’s a really phenomenal book — a brilliant examination of contemporary culture, but also a really impressively balanced blend of personal narrative and political analysis.
The first chapter is actually the weakest part of the book, to me — maybe because I’m quite familiar with doppelganger theory, but I think it also just seems like throat-clearing, like she doesn’t quite know where she’s going with the rest. This might be because it turns out that she’s going everywhere; that what starts as a question about how people could possibly confuse her with Naomi Wolf, and wow, what the hell happened to Naomi Wolf?! turns into an incredibly smart exploration of the contemporary intertwining of culture and politics, and the ways that the far-Left and far-Right end up mirroring each other, borrowing each other’s techniques and paranoias. What makes the book so thrilling is how each new chapter delves into yet another aspect, links in a whole new area, which I experienced every time as both surprising and overdetermined (oh! but of course!). And how it wove those threads through the whole, and then came back around to where it started, but with new insights — it was a marvel. A real knockout of a book.
Kasia Reads 