An uneven collection. The writing is always good - slightly showy, well-constructed, and honest. But this often masks ideas that don't seem that well thought out, or that are trivial.

For example, Havrilesky argues that "sitting at the bedside, holding the dying [spouse's] hand" is romantic. There are a million movies with this scene, but she is arguing as if this is a unique and brave argument that she is making.

In another essay, analysing the 2016 election, she asks, "[d]id the passivity of our screen-led lives slowly transform us into nihilists without our noticing?" As a throwaway observation, sure, maybe. As an explanation for the election of Donald Trump, I'd have to put it pretty far down the list.

There's a cluster of more personal essays at the end that are the strongest in the collection. Here the prose style suits the content very well, and Havrilesky is in her comfort zone. ( )

Not the same as Ask Polly. I was disappointed. ( )

Kind of an uneven collection, some of the essays were really good (the one about Disneyland was the strongest, IMO), but there were a number that focused on pop culture/TV shows that I didn’t find as interesting. ( )

Has an undeniable way with a sentence, but , in the end I’m not sure it amounts to much. ( )

I bought this one because I'd seen Heather Havrilesky's TV and movie reviews and enjoyed her insights, but there's a whole lot more going on in "What If This Were Enough?" than I bargained for. Havrilesky has a special talent for seeing through the distracting nonsense that fills our super-connected everyday to the logical endgame of much of modern American capitalism. The author seems to have a special talent for nosing out the creeping, discomfiting angst that lurks behind a lot of the institutions of the still relatively new internet age, whether it's guru culture or internet nostalgia or life-hacking or luxury living. The endless choices and opportunities for communication that the internet has facilitated has, in her view, skewed both our conceptions of ourselves and our values: the opportunity to live your "best life" can lead to success, but it can also make you feel lonely and alienated, and, should you not get to where you want to be, ashamed. Her central message, which is reiterated throughout this book, is that many of these media environments are more-or-less designed to make us feel weak, needy, insufficient and alienated, and that surviving them takes the courage to push back against the hidden assumptions that they make. Considering that techno-utopianism seems to have had a rough couple of years and many Americans still feel uncertain about both their economic futures and their value in a rapidly changing economy, this might be a message that a lot of people would benefit from hearing. Frankly, I'm probably one of those people myself. I reread several of these essays numerous times: the subject matter she was discussing felt familiar to me, but the implications of judging yourself and the world using internet-age metrics can be a hard habit to break. At its very best -- and there are some very good essays in this one -- reading Harvilesky can feel like getting deprogrammed. Maybe everyone who spends a whole lot of time cruising internet newsboards to no real purpose or who dreads looking at their Facebook feed lest they feel badly about themselves when they see that someone they knew at school has gotten married or published a book or something should read this one.

Of course, polemics against the way we live now can also go too far, and there are some places where I think the author might shade into arguments a bit too sentimental to really move a lot of potential readers. She emphasizes the importance of real human connection, but I think that some will doubt that there was every all that much of that to be found among us, even before we all plugged in to the world wide web. She argues passionately that believing in and loving yourself are essential not necessarily to success but to a certain kind of human contentment, and she might be right, but you can push that argument only so hard before your prose gets a bit too purple. Some readers might be put off by Havrilesky's authorial persona. She's protective, and rightly so, of the right to feel melancholy, conflicted, and wistful in a world that increasingly sees these feelings as signs of weakness. Throughout "What If This Were Enough" we see her describe and fight her insecurities, insist on her prerogatives, and try as best she can to celebrate her successes. These essays were never meant to be dry exercises in media criticism, but how you respond to them may depend, at least a little, on how you respond to Havrilesky herself: she has, after all, put a lot of herself into them. That being said, her diagnoses of what a hyperconsumerist society that insists, however subtly, that anything less than perfection constitutes failure and sees ordinary sadness and ambiguity as things to be eliminated as quickly as possible are as insightful and timely as anything I've read in the past few years. I wish that it was a bit higher up LibraryThing's rankings: this one often feels like the sort of book that many of us need right now. ( )