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Montgomery grapples with the complexities of being a woman in a patriarchal society in this memoiristic essay collection.

As a girl, the author looked to her intrepid aunt for subversive lessons on surviving in a man’s world. Silenced by adults, harassed by boys, and unsettled by her parents’ contentious marriage, she sought solace in the controlled world of her Polly Pocket toys. At school, she noticed the contradictory dress code by which boys were allowed to wear tank tops and sandals, while girls were forced into PTA-approved gym outfits, “shrouding [their] bodies like a secret, like shame.” Girls were “praised for disappearing” and shrank themselves with exercise and eating disorders. Montgomery’s mother urged her to “Hug your mad” and keep her face expressionless. The love affair between Leonardo DiCaprio’s and Kate Winslet’s characters in the movie Titanic became the romantic template for the author’s peers. In college, she connected “untrustworthy” female characters in literature to the way that women are socialized to doubt themselves around men. The author also shares a multitude of experiences in which men forced their bodies into her personal space—on planes, the street, in a grocery store, at a funeral. Montgomery offers incisive critique in this powerful first-person narrative in which “girlhood is a performance, womanhood even more so.” Indeed, the unrelentingly bleak tone of the collection may leave some readers wondering if there is any hope for women and girls in modern society. Throughout, she expertly eases readers into each vignette before pulling back the veil to reveal trauma and injustice, as in a story of a planetarium visit in which Orion’s Belt reminded her of “the one my parents use to spank me if I am naughty.” In vivid imagery, she shows how gender dynamics manifest, conjuring schoolboys in a classroom who “send their hands soaring like rockets into the sky,” only to answer questions incorrectly.

An intense, unflinching, and sometimes-dispiriting analysis of gender roles.