Reviews

Cathleen Medwick, O, the Oprah magazine

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Ranging from philosophy to literature to politics, Todd ruefully bares the “little sentimental subversions” that make us congratulate ourselves for feeling someone else’s pain (eyes misting over at a news clip of a remote disaster). He unmasks the hypocrisy that makes politicians insist on being just plain folks. And in a valiant attempt at self-exoneration, he confesses to the addictive thrill, the “dark pleasure” of living a lie. In the end, he muses, the goal may not be “to be yourself, but to see yourself as you are in the present, unredeemed by acts past or future” and to relish those fleeting moments with people you love when “you feel not unpleasantly that you are no more or less real than the candlelight.” That who you really are is the person you see in their eyes.

—Cathleen Medwick, O, The Oprah Magazine