These are some of the best essays I have read, and they're all together in one place. There's a deftness to the prose here I'm finding it difficult to put into words. Not much of the book is a "how to" for writers, but you can tell the author is a teacher: there is a sense, even in the essays that are not instructive, that you are being shown how it is done. 

The way intense, grave topics—abuse, grief, recovery—are handled not with a sense of wallowing, but with the intensity of the living. A brightness of anger, but also of progressive understanding. In the last essay, when Chee is describing the morning after Trump was elected and he was forced to bargain with himself: did he think he could make coffee? No. Did he think he could buy coffee? Yes. Then go and buy coffee, he tells himself. And then he found he could move. It is hard to describe why this is skilled, what feeling it describes. But it does describe a feeling. This scene, and this whole collection, felt so vivid to me. This person is alive. A masterclass in the essay. I must now read what else he has written.