About the book: 2023 / This book is based on Dodie Bellamy's 2010-2011 blog, in which the writer documented her attempts to free herself once and for all from an unsuccessful romance with an unnamed Buddhist guru. A public experiment that combines humor and vulnerability, life experience and a willingness to step on the same rake over and over again becomes a powerful antidote to shame and a reason to reflect on the practice of writing. Bellamy, a major figure in the San Francisco literary avant-garde of the 1980s and one of the main authors of the New Narrative, generously includes in the text her friends and colleagues, as well as creative figures who inspired her, from Sylvia Plath and Bessie Smith to Eva Hesse and Eileen Myles, asserting the right of a woman* to be frank and immoderate, to desire, to be angry and not to live up to expectations.