As with my earlier brand-defense conundrum, this was awkward for me for highly personal reasons. The main one being that my last encounter with Roth on the page was when I, at age twenty, whipped a copy of The Counterlife across my University of Toronto dorm room, vowing to never read another book by Philip Roth ever again. I was done learning, in intricate detail, about the complex life of his male characters, their intimate psychological dramas, and their big global ideas, only to have the female characters bounce across the page like scantily clad nurses in a Benny Hill sketch.

XREF: Connects to the reader's own experiences of abandoning authors mid-career and then being forced to revisit them, as the brand-defense conundrum mentioned earlier suggests. DEFINE: Illustrates the author's stated 'highly personal reasons' for awkwardness around Roth, showing how biographical baggage shapes critical engagement.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 450