Clare Stephens

I do like that you wrote in your notes on this, it's not an authentic social interaction if you're both living a lie.

Come on now.

That's the Claire Stevens credo.

Of course you're allowed to not like these books.

I couldn't understand where she was coming from on this.

I have read Strangers.

I have not read Yesteryear.

Strangers to me fell flat as a book for various reasons.

We're not sort of debating its merits here, but in essence, I didn't like

that it was the story of a marriage breakdown where I got no emotional complexity or sort of details of how the husband and wife interacted with each other prior to the divorce.

That's why I didn't like it.

Does that make me a bad feminist?

Because I felt that the memoir didn't have payoff?

The criticism I've come across of Yesteryear, which for the most part, I've just been seeing people say, read this book.

It's amazing.

One criticism I did see said that she displayed a certain lack of curiosity for the historical period, which she is writing about in the book.

There was not a lot of detail about what life actually was like at that time.

And it felt a bit flat in its depiction.

I wonder if she's including negative reviews in this idea of women shouldn't be allowed to write books.

That also applies to podcast reviews.