A lot of the time, I find memoirs self-indulgent. This was one of those memoirs. I am impatient to a fault, especially with the self-created or self-propagated problems of others. Especially others who are nothing but characters in books (at least to me).

Kathryn Borel is a decent writer. A few of her experiences with wine and men (though not with death or fathers) mirror my own. To some extent, I can relate. Her problems with wine and men, however, are much exacerbated by her own lack of confidence.

There seems to be nothing inside this woman. Sure, to read her words, she is overflowing with emotion. Even these emotions, though, are nothing but expectations and illusions created by TV shows. She has no worth and no personality outside of the affirmations she gets from others, whom she draws to her by her constant, needy, unrelenting desperation.

Despite the ostensibly happy ending, one ends this book with a feeling of continuing depression, and worse, caviling annoyance with life, and the sense that, for Kathryn, nothing has really changed.