Hirshey astutely notes the social class anger in Brown’s book, but also acknowledges that Brown was not interested in a revolution but in practical navigation of an unfair system that was not going to change in time for you. (…)
One person’s shocking truth confided vividly and recognizably can make others feel better. That is perhaps the very heart of the modern and certainly is at the core of Brown’s sense of sisterhood. (…)
Like Joan Rivers and Nora Ephron she was not a creative genius but a disciplined workaholic with a springy cadence in her sentences; she too felt bad about her neck; she too wanted to make a lot of money. She, too, was an amusing woman attached to something larger in the culture and wished to report on it.
