Naomi Klein's exploration of her doppelgänger, Naomi Wolf, and the "Mirror World" inhabited by conspiracy theorists like her, is a beautifully meandering, strange and thoughtful book. Klein's exploration of what doppelgängers mean in art, literature and psychology seamlessly blends with memoir as well as analysis of social forces shaping our world today, like the wellness-to-QAnon pipeline and other "diagonalist" trends. It's a nuanced analysis that resists us/them dichotomies and simplistic explanations.

Talking about doubling and mirroring requires also looking at the mirror twin in ourselves, the various forms of doubling in our own lives, and Klein does this through considering her own uncanny similarities to Wolf, as well as through looking at issues on the left that have allowed the Steve Bannons and Naomi Wolfs of the world to move in and mobilize average people for ultimately capitalist, individualist ends.

At one point Klein talks about how a correspondence with [a:John Berger|29919|John Berger|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1480363764p2/29919.jpg] helped her to recognize:

"[T]he search for calm is why I write: to tame the chaos in my surroundings, in my own mind, and - I hope - in the minds of my readers as well. The information is almost always distressing and, to many, shocking - but in my view, the goal should never be to put readers into a state of shock. It should be to pull them out of it."

I certainly left this book feeling calmer and more centred, having been forced to engage in some uncomfortable mirror viewing but more able to feel a path forward.