Review of The Lost Daughter (2021) by Asdfgtvy — 05 Jan 2022

Self-indulgent, lazy, and full of intellectual masturbation -- "look how hard motherhood is when I am trying to read Dante," "oh my god the unbearable weight of my domestic responsibilities even though I am translating Yeats," "I speak Italian, which is spoken by millions of people, but that makes me so incredibly uptight and snobby," "oh look at all my traumas: my mom didn't finish college and my daughter has the audacity of wanting to spend time with me.

" Olivia is great as always, but Maggie needs to get her head out of academia's ass -- the conference scene is laughable and nothing close to an academic gathering, which Maggie would know if she actually had a non-fetishistic relationship with intellectual life.

Ironically, the linguistic hospitality of Elena's writing is lost to Maggie, who thinks she is smart but simply isn't.