"[Phillips's] therapeutic thesis is that each of us carries a story of the life we should have lived, the life we missed out on, and, according to Phillips, the life we've already lived, to a degree, psychically. Phillips's way to perform these sleights of compositional magic is via style . I'm drawn to this aphoristic disentanglement of idioms in the language as it lets loose the playfulness sentence-making allows us." --Thomas Larson, The Rumpus "A wise, generous book. Phillips has a mild, expansive way of explaining the insights that psychoanalysis offers into our everyday drama, its glimpses of differently shaped problems behind the ones we thought we had." -- Dennis Duncan, The Washington Post "[Phillips is] like a flashlight in that his illuminating beam heightens my awareness of the dark . I drank [his] words like a tonic." --Dan Piepenbring, Harper's Magazine "Phillips has rendered the term 'giving up' spacious and flexible, having woven together psychology and literature to reveal suggestive points of contact .
Phillips makes an ambitious case: that giving up is as important to our psychological well-being as hope and love are . The best form of giving up, it seems, may just be to take up a book." --Sarah Moorhouse, Los Angeles Review of Books "One of the most arresting things about Adam Phillips's work is how it resists easy summary, dissolving into a trace memory the moment you try to describe it. Phillips doesn't try to prevent us from thinking whatever it is that we want to think; what he does is repeatedly coax us to ask if that's what we really believe, and how we can be sure." --Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times (An Editors' Choice) "Phillips continues to find inspiration in Freud--not only the provocative concepts, but the allowances for speculation in Freud's language . The connectivity between his observations carries a certain charge, an impetus to be curious rather than strictly determined about and by our wants." --Ron Slate, On the Seawall "If this collection marks the beginning of Phillips' late style, we have a lot to look forward to." -- Booklist "A thought-provokingly cerebral meditation.
" -- Kirkus Reviews.