I have always been rather dubious about the need to pin literature to any particular genre. Every work of art should be taken on its merits: either it works or it doesn’t. But when I got to within twelve pages of the end and read, ‘Since this is neither fact nor fiction, however, or since it is both, I am off the hook’, I began to believe there might be something in this category business after all. Readers do want to know what they are reading, especially when it is as confessional and personal as this book. Towards the end we see the veneer of fiction dissolving before our eyes as she writes, ‘if this were aspiring to be a “good story”, I would have to kill Ross off’. More and more I felt that I was reading an extended and not startlingly original essay on the meaning of life. Although it has moments of beauty and power, I missed the bones which provide structure for a shapely narrative.