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Well this was a huge disappointment. I had such high hopes for Roxane Gay! A Haitian American cultural critic with a master's and a nonperfect body type? Yes! I was sure she would eviscerate popular culture and social injustice with an incisive eye and a unique perspective. But nope. These aren't really essays; they're like unstructured wallowings, ramblings that just flit from thing to thing and never get anywhere or lead to any new thinking.

Yes, Gay takes stream-of-consciousness meanders through race and class and reality television and sexual violence and Twitter and respectability politics and Scrabble and The Hunger Games. But there's no structure! In one essay she'll talk about Twilight and then she'll talk about rape and then she'll talk about fairy tales, without ever returning or making any broad claims that tie it all together. In another, she goes on and on about how bad Law & Order: SVU is for our society and perpetuating rape culture, and then she says, "I've watched every episode of this show multiple times. I don't know what that says about me." You don't? Why not? This is a book of personal essays! Why don't you ponder that a little bit and try to draw some goddamn conclusions?

I never felt challenged by her ideas, and I don't think she challenged herself to actually dig into them, either. In an essay about why the book is called "Bad Feminist," she rails against the idea of an "essential feminism," whereby all feminists can be grouped into one category that's defined by a fixed set of ideals and traits. And then immediately after that she explains that she's a "bad" feminist because she likes the color pink and refuses to learn how cars work and wants to have a baby. Did she not even re-read her own work before sending it off to be put in a book?!

I think part of the problem (plagiarizing myself from my own comments) is that, because of teh internetz, publishers are conflating "popular on Twitter" with "is able to write well." They're tossing off book deals to anyone with an impressive following, and not pushing writers to do harder work than they've already done online. As if having a talent for snappy one-liners is not the exact goddamn opposite of being good at thinking deeply about an idea and drawing surprising and interesting conclusions from it.

On a more personal note, another issue has to be that I read this so shortly after the fall-down-stunning Empathy Exams. Jamison's dazzling pieces—or really any essays done well—read like tightly constructed meditations, beginning-middle-end investigations, pursuing an attempt to solve a quandary or at least interrogating an idea and shaking loose some brilliance from it. But Gay's "essays" are all basically unsophisticated blog posts. They never got anywhere and just left me frustrated.

In conclusion: there are some really fantastic essay collections being published today. This is definitely not one of 'em.