Love Oyler always, but felt like some of these essays were not as nearly strong as her criticism. Still enjoyed the book though.

Miss Lauren Oyler does it again! One of my favorite thinkers and ponderers of existence and what it means to be alive. Loved the anxiety essay, thought she took a lot of risks with this one.

I am a huge fan of Lauren Oyler since reading her Goop Cruise piece in Harpers last year, and I read this completely for personal taste, as opposed to most of the ARCs I read, which are for a YA Selection Committee.

That being said, Oyler's takes in this are clear and concise, and I felt relatable. She's funny, she's serious, she's an astute observer. I really appreciate her ability to put thoughts and feelings into words, no matter how complex, and do so with complete understandability.

I see her essays on Criticism (My Perfect Opinions) and Autofiction (I Am The One Sitting Here for Hours and Hours and Hours (I think that's the title?)) becoming standard texts for those subjects.

Definitely an enjoyable and enlightening read for those who will appreciate it, which I think is going to be a bigger audience than one would initially think. I'm going to try to recommend this to patrons when it comes out as much as I can.

No Judgment is funny and smart--especially the essay on auto-fiction--and made me want to reread Oyler's fiction. Feels like gossiping with your friends in publishing in the best, most fun way.

3.75
Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this one a little early ... and to be the first Goodreads review for a book that had me questioning the existence of Goodreads in the first place.
I really enjoyed this one, although I'd be lying if I said some of it didn't go completely over my head. While I try to read widely and I'm always up to date on book Twitter drama, this was my first time really engaging with the work of a literary critic, and Lauren's expertise shines. These works did a great job of synthesizing modern anecdotes with broader ideas, and I especially loved her essays on Berlin and autofiction.
This honestly took me back to my literature classes in college, which I miss so much. The whole time I was reading, I felt like I was eavesdropping on a conversation that I was fascinated by but could contribute absolutely nothing to

NO JUDGMENT is a book of critical essays largely about cultural criticism, an angle I’ll predict will be rewardingly dishy and meta for ‘media types’ and potentially mystifying for people looking for more Jia Tolentino. Lauren Oyler doesn’t care about being relatable—one of the book’s essays actually takes aim at ‘relatability,’ as a part of a larger and very convincing analysis of how we discuss ‘vulnerability.’ Oyler is happy to speak on topics that interest or appeal to her, as an author of a novel and freelance expat writer in Berlin; if these biographical facts, or her ready impulse to call a lot of thing stupid, will turn you off, leave Oyler for the rest of us!

NO JUDGMENT is interested in shoring up the seawall between the ocean of loose opinions and the ever-eroding shores of cultural criticism. The book is wired for opposition; the governing ideal, Oyler states in the intro, is revenge. One sentence, robbed of its topic, could stand in for the thesis of the book: “As with anything that matters, the language we use to describe [X] is all wrong.” Oyler’s style is trenchant and acerbic, the semi-colons variously chatty and and a little bitchy. Some essays hovered for a surprising number of pages in the conceptual space, cleverly pinning down terms, but on occasion I wanted more specificity. (The last essay, on anxiety, is very specific. I felt that the anecdotes mentioned in the gossip essay were holding back, especially in light of the great details abounding in Oyler's Harper's piece about the Goop Cruise.)

A good collection of essays or short stories needs some theme to ground it, like a mixed tape or concept album. The through line of NO JUDGMENT is how criticism is performed or evaded in the contemporary moment—a topic that one couldn't hope for a more relevant writer to engage with. Oyler has built a name for herself as not only a critic but an actually critical critic, and more than that, a critical critic who criticizes others' hollow performances of self-criticism.

But when you leave aside the through line—it is, after all, merely a through line—the topics of each chapter fall into a different constellation. Goodreads reviews, American expats in Berlin, the experience of anxiety, and so on—all of them share the same nexus, which is the author herself. It's very consumer-brained to expect that each essay in a collection will appeal to every reader, and yet it feels somehow narcissistic that all the essays in this collection are just opportunities for Oyler to wax about herself but at a short critical remove. The book almost has the feeling of a memoir, but not its courage to embrace self-indulgence.

The other downside to Oyler's work is that she writes like an English major. She loves using semicolons, getting into etymology, dissecting parts of speech, and mulling over synonyms. In one chapter, she says that she can't forgive David Foster Wallace for encouraging cringe; I can't forgive David Foster Wallace for letting people think that they can write like college sophomores for the rest of their lives.

What's ultimately forgivable about Oyler is that she has a sense of humor. One may not walk away from this book with many insights, but it was fun to be reminded of that Halsey tweet about Pitchfork.