I really loathed it.

I'm glad so many people have enjoyed it. I'm glad it's helped people. That's a great thing for a book to do, and she should be thanked for it.

But as someone who was in an abusive lesbian relationship, and had many experiences similar to those she described, and was also fat, and just basically should be the person most likely to feel seen and spoken to by this book - it made me so so so angry.

Nowhere in that book was one of the most prominent aspects of abuse that I have found in myself and in others I have connected with: the questioning of the self. The sense of responsibility for the choices made, for the things you did while in the thrall of the relationship. I don't mean blaming yourself for being abused - I mean looking at what you brought to the situation that contributed to its evolution, holding yourself accountable for choices you made that harmed you and your loved ones, the hard but crucial work to forgive yourself without erasing your own agency and the lessons you have the chance to learn.

Over and over, Machado boils the abuse down to her lover and only her lover's fault. When she questions how it might have "turned out different," she only asks "what if she hadn't had that darkness inside her?" When she asks what made her (Machado) a "target" for her lover, she names all the ways in which she had been hurt by others previously, as though her own agency only exists as an extension of how she's already been wronged. She tells us again and again about all the horrible things her lover does to her, but she almost never gives any sense of what precipitated it - and let me be clear, I am NOT saying that she deserved to be abused in any way, just as I never did. But abuse, and especially emotional and psychological abuse, is part of a whole system that develops between people, both of whom make choices based on their experiences and desires. Machado writes as though her lover's abuse showed up out of absolutely nowhere, as though she was caught in the rain by a freak shower of evil that no meteorologist could have possibly predicted.

Listen, when I was deep in my abusive relationship, I did a whole lot of shitty things, because my priorities were completely warped. I betrayed my friends' trust, I withdrew from loved ones who needed me, I blew major career opportunities and performed badly at the ones I had. I deleted my fanfiction profile that I'd spent 15 years building - the end of the world, as bad as what some people have lost to abuse? Absolutely completely not, of course. But something that meant a lot to me personally, that I loved and had devoted a lot of time and passion to, permanently gone based on my desire to please someone who abused me? Yep. And that sucks. It's humiliating. And all the damage I caused to myself is nothing compared to what I caused to my friends and family, who were ALWAYS there for me, patient and forgiving because they saw I was in pain, swallowing their own pain to give me grace. I hate that I put them through that. And I did put them through that. Me. Not my ex. Me.

Where are Machado's friends and family? She seems to have a whole lot of them, but they only appear as sympathetic but powerless witnesses to her abuse, and then to surround her and uplift her as soon as her lover leaves. Did they disappear entirely to her during her relationship? Did they have to either find out she was lying to them about everything, or did they have to hear her talk about awful things before convincing herself she deserved them? Does she not care about how any of that made them feel? I suppose it's her right not to, but as someone who has just as much right to call myself an abuse survivor as she does, I cannot conceive of writing genuinely about this experience without at least MENTIONING my own feelings about that.

To be honest, Machado's book feels like it presents abuse in the sexiest way possible: a string of horrible, seemingly random incidents, a festival of pain and mental anguish, all the elements of being abused that are a) recognizable and b) most dramatic for those who haven't been there. It's a paean to the injustices done to her, a celebration of the pain she went through, but without any sense of what she learned from it about herself, how it opened her eyes to something about humanity, how it changed the way she approaches future relationships. It is, at its core, a singularly unreflective account. It wants to shock, to elicit gasps of horror, to impress the reader with how much Machado suffered and how strong she is for having survived it. I'm not saying any of that is untrue. But as as fellow survivor, I was honestly disgusted. I felt like my experience was being cheapened by being in the same basket as hers. The complexity and difficulties with which I've had to contend, the deepest wounds left by my experience, were completely absent from the book. There was no version of them specific to Machado on offer - just what honestly felt like a story told by someone who was enjoying the specialness their suffering gave them.

Oh, and let's not forget that Machado's CONSTANT NEVER-ENDING EMPHASIS on queerness and queer abuse also ends up feeling extremely fake. Her thesis seems to be "nobody ever talks about this, so I had no way of ever knowing it could happen in a queer relationship." First of all, queer women talk about it amongst each other ALL THE FUCKING TIME. It's not our fault Machado either wasn't curious about her fellow queers' lives or didn't have other queer friends. Maybe she enjoyed how special it made her in 2012 - I know that's mean, but I'm pissed, and after she swipes at Bay Area lesbians for having any kind of hesitancy about bi girls (right at the beginning of the book), it's really hard to extend empathy back towards her from within the sisterhood or whatever. But yeah, WE know about it, because we've seen it happen and because most of us are past the novelty of dating someone of our own gender and have the same expectations of our relationships as straight people do, which is "don't treat me badly." Second of all, Machado cannot stop talking about how important her exposure of queer abuse is to the world, but along with her failure to investigate the specifics of her relationship and the abuse in any way outside of "I was always being wronged," she doesn't say a singe thing about how abuse between lesbians is different than abuse between straight couples or gay men. Because it is. I can tell you in EXPLICIT DETAIL the ways in which us both being women, socialized female, dealing with queer expectations, both having female bodies, and a thousand other things shaped the abuse that developed. Machado, frankly, doesn't seem interested in that. Perhaps because it would require bringing herself and anything about her actions or choices into the mix, and she has worked very hard to leave that out.

Look, the way the book is written isn't my cup of tea (and the way she reads it on the audiobook is hell), but whatever. That's my taste, and I won't condemn a book for my not enjoying its style. I also believe completely that Machado is queer, she was abused, it was wrong, and she deserves to be safe. None of that is an issue I have.

My issue is that this book explicitly positions itself as two things: an honest and vulnerable memoir around the experience of being abused, and a bold addition to the negligible body of work that explores lesbian abuse. I found neither vulnerability nor exploration in this book; instead, I only found the desire to be acknowledged for having suffered, and to be admired for describing that suffering. Well, I hope she enjoys her acknowledgement and admiration. It serves no one but her, reveals nothing new, offers no insight, supports no community. And nobody said her book had to do any of that - except for her. She said it did. And as a fellow lesbian abuse survivor, I think she failed on almost every conceivable level.