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 a failed romance with an unnamed Buddhist guru. A public experiment that combines humor and vulnerability, life experience and the 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 her friends and colleagues, as well as inspirational creative figures from Sylvia Plath and Bessie Smith to Eva Hesse and Eileen Miles. asserting the right of a woman* to be frank and immoderate, to desire, to be angry and not to live up to expectations.