Would You Rather? A Memoir of Growing Up and Coming Out

Heaney follows Never Have I Ever, a memoir about her dismal experiences dating men in her mid-20s, with an uneven second memoir in which she explores her attraction to women and describes how she settled into millennial lesbian-partnered bliss. Heaney offers her mostly unoriginal reactions to depictions of lesbians in the media (e.g., she was drawn to the characters in the television show The L Word) and to celebrities (“Queer girls who are into Harry Styles is a definite thing,” she writes on the topic of her male celebrity crush). Her analysis of her elementary school crushes is not all that revealing, as for example when she looks at the breasts of a foreign-exchange student staying with her family for “just a beat too long.” Heaney is most thoughtful when musing about her small-scale celebrity, which resulted from the success of her first memoir, and the “confessional responsibility” she has to her readers to inform them that she is no longer the person they read about in that book. As with her first book, this one feels undercooked; Heaney’s stories are fun and uplifting, but they lack introspection. (Mar.)