I enjoyed digging in to Lauren Oyler's No Judgment. Oyler's style is prickly and fun. She doesn't hesitate to share her opinions on the state of modern literature and culture. Her essays on Goodreads and autofiction were particularly insightful. Unfortunately, the book didn't work for me as a whole. While all essay collections are bound to have hits and misses, this one had a few too many misses for me. I would still recommend it to the right reader; I could see Oyler's style working for particular audiences.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced reader copy in exchange for my honest review.

There's no doubt that Lauren Oyler is a great writer. Some of these essays are very deep and academic, so much so that a few of them went over my head. I especially enjoyed her essay "My Perfect Opinions", which discusses the nuances of Goodreads. Seems pretty meta to be writing a book review about Goodreads. Her essay "The Power of Vulnerability", discussed her opinions of Brene Brown and her theory of vulnerability, of which she's built a small empire. While I agreed with some of Oyler's thoughts on this, I felt that she came across a bit bitter and mean-spirited.

Overall, I did enjoy No Judgment. It did take me awhile to get through though.

First book of March and I'm so thankful to Harper Audio, Netgalley, Lauren Oyler, and Libro.fm for the advanced digital and audio access to this book before it hits shelves on March 19, 2024.

Oyler is a fabulous linguist and writer, and I couldn't get enough of her essays on judgment, criticism, and being alive. There were countless times when I physically laughed out loud, reacting to something snarky and relatable that she had to say, especially when talking about the critics of GoodReads and how this feels so meta typing out this review, as I am not a paid professional, I'm just doing this for free and for fun.

Oyler is so well-researched and I will now be scavenging the internet to locate more of her non-fiction work, because I just loved what I consumed.

Ok but not great. Essays written like they're for a magazine or a website, definitely not about issues of "substance" by design. But just not my thing.

I thought about cheekily giving this book a one-star rating after Oyler's "takedown" of Goodreads, but I enjoyed it too much. I really liked the essays on GoodReads and autofiction, and generally appreciate the angle from which Oyler approaches things. TED talks are stupid. These essays were well considered and they often tickled me. I look forward to whatever she writes next, although I hope that doesn't put undue pressure on her.

Oyler's essay collection stands as a cultural artifact and critique. I can't recall a essay collection that has felt as "in-the-know" as this one in recent years, particularly the growing discourse on what it means to be a reader in the social media age. While the essays themselves don't focus on social media, what's impressive is Oyler's self-awareness to how writers and readers cannot exist without understanding how the evolution of a readership has shapeshifted in the prominence of social media. Highlights of the collection include thoughts on autofiction and even Marvel movies. Oyler also doesn't spare herself from critical inquiry, citing her published novel to be put under the microscope of bookish readers and "public" readers alike: the reactionary impulse of the world determining what's in and what's out, what's cool and what isn't, what's fact vs. fiction, etc. No Judgement is a delightful book of questions that isn't afraid to give plenty of confident and assured answers.

lauren oyler explores gossip, goodreads, living in berlin, autofiction, vulnerability, and mental illness in this essay collection. my favorite pieces were: my perfect opinions; i am the one who is sitting here, for hours and hours and hours; and my anxiety. no shock to anyone that the one about goodreads and the one about autofiction were top tier for me!

i thought this was a great mix of both personal and researched writing - lauren’s own anecdotes and the examples she pulls from other sources are all used in an entertaining and intriguing way. these are longer essays that reference a lot of other works (both essays and books). i added a lot of new stuff to my list of things to read, and find myself keen to read more essays published outside of the typical essay collection format, starting with a bunch of the ones mentioned in this book! it really stands out to me that i have a genuine interest in doing further reading, because that doesn’t always happen for me with super referential work - it’s a signifier that i was pulled in by the topics discussed here.

no judgment is a very realistic look at the subjects of each essay. oyler is skilled at unpacking the opposing viewpoints, while maintaining the strength of her opinions. i appreciate that she’s able to make conceits where necessary and acknowledge the multifaceted and sometimes hypocritical nature of humans beings. the tone is funny, verging on millennial humor but in a self aware way. lauren and i both love a dash, a semicolon, and a parenthetical, but certain sentences felt a bit overwritten and hard to follow so i welcomed those moments of levity. overall a solid collection and i really need to check out her novel fake accounts!

4.5 stars rounded to 4 stars. I really enjoyed the topics of these essays. The style in which Oyler approaches the topics is also very interesting. It feels weird to write a review on Goodreads about this book as there is an entire essay dedicated to criticism including a long section regarding Goodreads. That being said I enjoyed how the essays engaged the reader and the thoughts behind them. They did run a bit long but the author even states in an early essay that is her reading style so it follows that would be her writing style. If you are the type of reader who likes sprawling essays with large words that you may or may not need to google this is the essay collection for you. The best essay to me was Why do you live here? but I also enjoyed My Perfect Opinions.

Love Oyler always, but felt like some of these essays were not as nearly strong as her criticism. Still enjoyed the book though.

Miss Lauren Oyler does it again! One of my favorite thinkers and ponderers of existence and what it means to be alive. Loved the anxiety essay, thought she took a lot of risks with this one.

I am a huge fan of Lauren Oyler since reading her Goop Cruise piece in Harpers last year, and I read this completely for personal taste, as opposed to most of the ARCs I read, which are for a YA Selection Committee.

That being said, Oyler's takes in this are clear and concise, and I felt relatable. She's funny, she's serious, she's an astute observer. I really appreciate her ability to put thoughts and feelings into words, no matter how complex, and do so with complete understandability.

I see her essays on Criticism (My Perfect Opinions) and Autofiction (I Am The One Sitting Here for Hours and Hours and Hours (I think that's the title?)) becoming standard texts for those subjects.

Definitely an enjoyable and enlightening read for those who will appreciate it, which I think is going to be a bigger audience than one would initially think. I'm going to try to recommend this to patrons when it comes out as much as I can.

No Judgment is funny and smart--especially the essay on auto-fiction--and made me want to reread Oyler's fiction. Feels like gossiping with your friends in publishing in the best, most fun way.

3.75
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this one a little early ... and to be the first Goodreads review for a book that had me questioning the existence of Goodreads in the first place.
I really enjoyed this one, although I'd be lying if I said some of it didn't go completely over my head. While I try to read widely and I'm always up to date on book Twitter drama, this was my first time really engaging with the work of a literary critic, and Lauren's expertise shines. These works did a great job of synthesizing modern anecdotes with broader ideas, and I especially loved her essays on Berlin and autofiction.
This honestly took me back to my literature classes in college, which I miss so much. The whole time I was reading, I felt like I was eavesdropping on a conversation that I was fascinated by but could contribute absolutely nothing to

NO JUDGMENT is a book of critical essays largely about cultural criticism, an angle I’ll predict will be rewardingly dishy and meta for ‘media types’ and potentially mystifying for people looking for more Jia Tolentino. Lauren Oyler doesn’t care about being relatable—one of the book’s essays actually takes aim at ‘relatability,’ as a part of a larger and very convincing analysis of how we discuss ‘vulnerability.’ Oyler is happy to speak on topics that interest or appeal to her, as an author of a novel and freelance expat writer in Berlin; if these biographical facts, or her ready impulse to call a lot of thing stupid, will turn you off, leave Oyler for the rest of us!

NO JUDGMENT is interested in shoring up the seawall between the ocean of loose opinions and the ever-eroding shores of cultural criticism. The book is wired for opposition; the governing ideal, Oyler states in the intro, is revenge. One sentence, robbed of its topic, could stand in for the thesis of the book: “As with anything that matters, the language we use to describe [X] is all wrong.” Oyler’s style is trenchant and acerbic, the semi-colons variously chatty and and a little bitchy. Some essays hovered for a surprising number of pages in the conceptual space, cleverly pinning down terms, but on occasion I wanted more specificity. (The last essay, on anxiety, is very specific. I felt that the anecdotes mentioned in the gossip essay were holding back, especially in light of the great details abounding in Oyler's Harper's piece about the Goop Cruise.)

A good collection of essays or short stories needs some theme to ground it, like a mixed tape or concept album. The through line of NO JUDGMENT is how criticism is performed or evaded in the contemporary moment—a topic that one couldn't hope for a more relevant writer to engage with. Oyler has built a name for herself as not only a critic but an actually critical critic, and more than that, a critical critic who criticizes others' hollow performances of self-criticism.

But when you leave aside the through line—it is, after all, merely a through line—the topics of each chapter fall into a different constellation. Goodreads reviews, American expats in Berlin, the experience of anxiety, and so on—all of them share the same nexus, which is the author herself. It's very consumer-brained to expect that each essay in a collection will appeal to every reader, and yet it feels somehow narcissistic that all the essays in this collection are just opportunities for Oyler to wax about herself but at a short critical remove. The book almost has the feeling of a memoir, but not its courage to embrace self-indulgence.

The other downside to Oyler's work is that she writes like an English major. She loves using semicolons, getting into etymology, dissecting parts of speech, and mulling over synonyms. In one chapter, she says that she can't forgive David Foster Wallace for encouraging cringe; I can't forgive David Foster Wallace for letting people think that they can write like college sophomores for the rest of their lives.

What's ultimately forgivable about Oyler is that she has a sense of humor. One may not walk away from this book with many insights, but it was fun to be reminded of that Halsey tweet about Pitchfork.