DRMacIver's Notebook

Book Review: All The Lives I Want by Alana Massey

Book Review: All The Lives I Want by Alana Massey

Reasonably strongly recommended.

This is a collection of essays about the lives of famous women, and the author’s life, and the experience of being a woman.

Confession: When this book arrived from Amazon I went “Wait, why did I order this again?”. Fortunately past me was wiser than other-past me and it was a good order. I’m pretty indifferent to a lot of popular culture, so many of the people referenced in this book were ones I didn’t or barely recognised. That didn’t really matter.

This is another book that is slightly meandering and personal in the way that I complained about for Writing to Learn. Unlike Writing to Learn, that was fine - I never felt that the book should get to the point, because the story it was telling was the point.

I don’t have a good summary of the book, except perhaps that it’s about giving a sympathetic eye to women who do not normally get one, and it does that very well. It’s not exactly a light read - the content is at times fairly distressing - but it is well written and to the point in a way that means it also never feels like a heavy one.