Against all odds, this unsparing, must-read portrait of modern dating and sex is also a love story.
Despite the title, a very personal—and thoroughly researched—memoir of dating younger men.
In this warm, witty, and rigorously honest memoir, a "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater–type exposé on dating apps,” Sales takes us behind the scenes of her work as a journalist and filmmaker and her own experiences with Tinder. The most affecting of these involved a mostly irresistible, sometimes disappointing young man she calls Abel, 23 to her 49 when they met, with whom she remained involved for four years, while both continued swiping and hooking up with others. The author, “a single mom by choice,” managed to keep her daughter, Zazie, in the dark about her love life—thank God for summer camp—and relied on a supportive network of friends and the proprietors of her neighborhood bar and cafe to help her keep some perspective on her experiences. Ironically, the same year she met Abel, Sales went to war with Tinder by publishing in Vanity Fair what was apparently the first article to criticize the dating app. The company fought back with a smear campaign, but Sales continued working—and dating. On the memoir side, Sales writes engagingly about her parents and her coming-of-age in Florida waiting tables in their hippie diner, and she takes us through some failed relationships, her successful journalism career, and stories of dating during the pandemic. The personal narrative is illuminated by often chilling research—e.g., a 2014 Harvard Business School study that “should dispel any notion that millennial men ‘see women as equals’ ” or a 2019 survey that found “31 percent of the women…reported being sexually assaulted or raped by someone they had met through an online dating site. Sales makes it abundantly clear that it’s not pretty out there.
Against all odds, this unsparing, must-read portrait of modern dating and sex is also a love story.Pub Date: May 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-49274-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
