Well, mostly. Speaking for myself now, just as an example, panicked episodes (so often likened in art to movement, to scattershot speed, to a desperate need to escape) feel like being pushed through a sieve, my skin reforming as it gets gutted and twisted by the metal, until I'm sat, stuck, sandwiching a web of steel that sits lodged within every single molecule of my body, an infinite, cutting, invisible weight. I'm not saying I want the above in this book. That is my life, not Gilda's. What I want is evidence that Gilda experiences herself in ways specific to her, because that is the spiritual truth, that your mental state always manifests relative to you. There is one moment, buried in this book, where Eileen (Gilda's girlfriend) gives her the present of a box of thin mints, having remembered some past time Gilda had mentioned liking them. The knowledge that she is attentively loved by this person strikes Gilda so forcefully that she hides the box away to block any association with this love from forming in her mind. This rejection of a base joy of life, this inability to interface with another person's warmth, for fear of its eventual extinguishment, better to never have anything in this world than to one day lose it; that sadness, that discomfort, felt true. I wish I felt that with this book more than once. To then tie the whole thing up in such a neat bow, as Austin does, to not leave even one string dangling, to absolve our protagonist of any guilt, misses the picture so entirely that I'm left wondering what she thought she was drawing.