I WANT TO BURN THIS PLACE DOWN

Unexpectedly charming personal essays about disillusionment, diabetes, and despair.

Like her first book, Slaughterhouse 90210, Kreizman’s essay collection is anchored in her love of popular culture and takes its title from a Great Moment in Television. “In the final season of Mad Men, after Peggy and Joan have spent years clawing their way to the middle of their fictional advertising agency,” they have a meeting with the new owners of the firm during which the continued reign of the grossest kind of misogyny is confirmed. Afterward, Peggy asks Joan if she wants to get lunch, and Joan replies, “I want to burn this place down.” To Kreizman, this is a symbol of all the times she herself has had to learn that “working hard and playing by the rules can be futile and demeaning if the game itself has always been rigged.” While she opines convincingly about various societal issues—climate change, health care, corporate capitalism—the personal remains at the heart of her work, and some of the best essays are about her experience with diabetes, shedding light on the wider experience of chronic illness. It’s the writing that makes it sing: “Puberty beat the shit out of me in unique and astounding ways. My hormones, surging like a 2-liter bottle of Diet Coke when you open it immediately after you’ve dropped it on the floor, caused my blood sugar to rise and fall and rise even higher with seemingly no correspondence to the insulin I was taking or the food I was eating.” Another standout is titled “Copaganda and Me,” in which she wrestles with the fact that after their shared childhood watching police shows on television, she grew up alienated while “[m]y brothers grew up and became cops, both of them. Twin Jewish cops.” Along with righteous anger, there’s plenty of sweetness, with evocative passages about her New Jersey childhood and paeans to her very happy union with a nice man named Josh. “I’m perpetually astonished to find that marriage is one of the only institutions that has not disappointed me.”

Though gentler than its title suggests, an intelligent and entertaining read.