I liked the other memoir by Athill that I read, but this one was weirdly impersonal -- a lot of people in her life treated her very badly (by modern standards) and it's like she kind of knows it, but also doesn't really want to know it, so she describes it clearly and is like 'well this may sound terrible and I guess it was but oh well' which is just ... weird and unsatisfying to read, I kept wanting to go back in time and suggest she didn't deserve to be treated like that!   And the parts with the authors she worked with being really unprofessional and unpleasant... I think a lot of it was meant to be funny, but for me it was just awful.