The review that caused the trouble came from an unexpected direction.
Not a hostile review. Not Nadia or her proxies, who had been silent for two years. Not anyone I had reason to expect. A review in a major literary publication, written by a critic whose name I didn’t know, who had read the book with intelligence and rigor and whose review acknowledged its qualities fairly before arriving, in the final third, at a question.
The question was this: the book presented itself as memoir, as lived truth, but the author had benefited significantly from the Hargrove inheritance, had emerged from the arrangement in a position of considerable wealth and security, and the review asked whether that material outcome colored the narrative, whether the story of a woman choosing her arranged marriage c
