"That's the precise point, 1 minute and 10 seconds in, where I clicked off the audiobook."

I wrote, 2 days ago, in what I called "a short, enigmatic blog post." I said, "I think anyone, using AI, can now easily discover what book is being talked about."

Shortly after posting, I tested AI and added the story of how it failed to identify the book. The problem was that the language I found so off-putting — "For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land" — wasn't written by the book's author. It was the book's epigraph, a quote from "Moby-Dick," a quote that at least 2 other authors have used. AI never found the book I'd been listening to. 

At that point, I became curious enough to go back to the audiobook and I listened to the whole thing. It was a book I'd blogged about last Tuesday after reading a NYT column about it. The column was called "She Was a Famous Millennial Feminist. Her Polyamory Memoir Is Heartbreaking." I have a long-running problem with the word "heartbreaking," and I blurted out "Heartbreaking? Really? It's dangerous bullshit from West. I don't regard this as another occasion to summon up empathy."

West = Lindy West. The book is "Adult Braces: Driving Myself Sane" (commission earned). And I'm going to stand by my blurted-out opinion: It is not heartbreaking. It's dangerous bullshit. 

Let me quote from page 123, where the author call herself a “people pleaser" and calls "people pleaser" "a hideous misnomer for a hideous behavior." Boldface added:

“People pleasing” is never about pleasing people—it’s about the pleaser avoiding discomfort, confrontation, accountability. It’s a manipulation, a rot that threatens all my relationships, not because it makes me “too nice” and vulnerable to exploitation, but because it makes me a liar who isn’t willing to do the hard work of love. It’s actually cruel to not want to know how people feel. I have always been adept at oozing my way through life from comfortable place to comfortable place, avoiding conflict and embarrassment, which sounds like a form of chillness but is really a form of control. Even what people perceive in me as “bravery,” my candor and vulnerability, is a form of control. You really think I’m telling you everything? I decide which parts of me you see; I curate the way you understand my pain with sharp precision.

Just to be clear. She's not saying that the reader understands with sharp precision. Quite the opposite. She curates with sharp precision. She decides what you see. She's writing in the first person, but the first person is an unreliable narrator. It's held out as nonfiction. She's writing about real people — herself, her husband, the extra person who makes them a throuple — and she is controlling what we see.

She admits it, even as she asserts that all nonfiction authors do it:

You are predisposed to sympathize with me. This is my book, and you’re reading it. Presumably, you like me. At the very least, you’re stuck in my head, and I control the aperture. In many ways, my side of the story is easier to understand than Aham’s—mine hews to cultural norms about heterosexual love and relationships while his challenges them. Also, he was a big asshole and put me through hell. I could write this book in a way that would make you hate Aham’s guts and pity me for staying with him. Or I could write it in a way that makes him sound tortured yet wise and makes me sound like a codependent freak. It’s all true. All nonfiction is actually fiction. All nonfiction is actually fiction.

Early on, reading this book, I formed the opinion that the author Lindy West was writing the character Lindy West as an unreliable narrator. The writer is not the character. The character allowed the writer to give us all the material we need to pity the character who heartily embraces the husband and his girlfriend. And to absolutely hate that awful man she married!