It's like Candice Bushnell's The Anatomy of Melancholy.

The book is about the word "like," specifically in its form of a filler word. It is about filler words in general, but the book unmakes filler words as filler words in its analysis of the different connotations and shades of like in usage.

The book is concerned with gender, as the critiques of the use of the word like often have a gendered component, but also in politics, as critiques often have a political component, albeit a second order one. The paradox is that the most frequently critiqued for using the word like, young women, are also the engineers of linguistic meaning, setting the tone (literally, sometimes) for conversation throughout a culture.

My disappointment here is that the scope is limited to the usage of like as a filler. Like is a rich word for usage, including the term for romantic attraction and as the fundament on which all social media springs. The exception that proves the rule here is discussing earlier usages of the word like: the prior moral panics over agrammatical usage of like, which are now used today without blush from purists.

It is not academic, but it does not profess to be. It is a quick read, but dense in is areas of coverage. I liked it; while not novel, it provides a good grounding.

But...so...like...okay, so at one point, the book starts in on Marisa Tomei's Academy Award winning performance as Mona Lisa Vito in My Cousin Vinny. And while you should never explain the joke, the book explains the joke and how the joke works, which essentially mirrors much about the word like in its divergence between the content of speech and the verbal tics of speech. We should always be glad to explore anything about the exquisite piece cinema that is My Cousin Vinny. But this exploration highlights the metafictional turn, as the structure of the book operates in the form of the rebuttal to the complaint about the use of the word like.

This book is impossible to review, not because it is impossible to review, but because it is impossible to review. The acerbic critic in me would toss off how if the blog parts were left out, this would be term paper length, but that is wrong, not because it is wrong, but because it is wrong. The diversions are multiplicative, not subtractive. Often insightful, they are often not insightful for their connections to the specific material in the text but to the mise-en-scène of the book, literally so in terms of the structure of the writing on the page, but equally figuratively, or whatever writerly word you want to use to reflect that concept in written form. The text itself is an extended like. It is filler, but not in a way that would improve the sentiment by its removal. It works, not always, but often enough, and I ran out of proverbial tabs for the bits of sidelong insight that function wholly apart from but necessarily within the context of the thesis. Additionally, or alongside, or on top of, I will have zero surprise if the reviews skew based on the reviewer's age. The writing here has a generational architecture. You may feel put off by it but for some of us, but for me, this is cozy, so it may be that it is too similar to my own internality to function out of deep critical conserve, but this is a feature not a bug, and the sort of cool thing that words can do, all of which, again, works to reflect the light of the core, an inverted disco ball, the summary of madness, a roller coaster of a book. I like it.

My thanks to the author, Megan C. Reynolds, for writing the book and to the publisher, HarperOne, for making the ARC available to me.

I’ll get straight to the chase: I was really looking forward to this book and ultimately did not like it.

The misogynistic hatred of the word “like” has always bothered me. I was hoping for a history & analysis of the word, its uses, and a rebuttal of common criticisms “like” faces.

At its best, the book did that. Every time I considered setting the book down for good, I decided to keep going thanks to an analysis of linguistic research, a critique of earlier waves of feminism, and interesting discussion of conveying feeling through “like”, etc.

But as I said - I did not like this book. For something that seems so research based, it’s undermined by the number of personal anecdotes & assertions.

The structure is also utterly nonsensical and disjointed. There’s a myriad of long winded digressions into Obama era politics, Ice Spice, cobra Kai, AI, Love is Blind, and so much more. These digressions add little (if anything), read like ads, and are overall incredibly confusion inclusions. These digressions, as well as the author’s humor, really did not click for me.

This could’ve (and should’ve) been a short article.