This was difficult. I feel like the afterword made me appreciate it more, but also the fact I needed an afterword to justify or explain it to me says a lot.

To be fair, I enjoyed it to begin with. I thought it was manic and over the top, but I was intrigued by the way it began, the endless letters to Dick, what it said about Chris and her husband, how they started to play things out.

But then it just felt like a book that went on and on while we rolled around in her obsessions. I guess that’s the point tho? And the fact the author is the main character, the blurring over what is and isn’t fiction - I guess it’s brave to put something out so boldly showing yourself in an obsessive light. But it just felt uncomfortable.

Then at the same, she riffs on the history of women in art, how they’ve been perceived, and then sort of makes you feel guilty for feeling uncomfortable. As if, by you not seeing what is so magical and feminist about her act of exposure and debasement, that you are in the same way part of the problem.

So I don’t know. It felt like the author was playing intellectual checkmate with me constantly to cover up her own obsessive behaviour.

I found her a completely unreliable narrator. And when Dick wrote back to her and was an absolute Dick to her, instead of sadness, I found it cathartic. And yet I feel bad about that. Ugh.