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This was a very sophisticated book that blended memoir with an educational resource perfectly. I think the chapter that will stick with me most is the one about female characters having the quality of likability held over their heads moreso than male characters, and readers don't ever realize that. It wasn't something I'd never thought about before, and it made me think critically about my expectations of female characters. I'm just gonna let the quote speak for itself:

"In a Publishers Weekly interview with Claire Messud about her novel The Woman Upstairs, which features a rather 'unlikable' protagonist, Nora, who is bitter, bereft, and downright angry about what her life has become, the interviewer said, 'I wouldn't want to be friends with Nora, would you?' And there we have it. A reader was here to make friends with the characters in a book and she didn't like what she found.
Messud, for her part, had a sharp response for her interviewer.

'For heaven's sake, what kind of question is that? Would you want to be friends with Humbert Humbert? Would you want to be friends with Mickey Sabbath? Saleem Sinai? Hamlet? Krapp? OEdipus? Oscar Mao? Antigone? . . . If you're reading to find friends, you're in deep trouble. We read to find life, in all its possibilities. The relevant question isn't "Is this a potential friend for me?" but "Is this character alive?"'"