This was, well, a weird one. It was on the “Next Big Ideas” book club list of past books, and I decided to check it out, mostly on the basis of the subtitle: “The power of being an outsider in an insider world.” It should come as no surprise to my friends that I feel like a weirdo some of the time. (Okay, maybe all of the time.) So I was excited to see if this book could give me any useful tips on harnessing my outsider-ness to better effect. And, sure, there were a few useful pieces of advice: having a support structure is super-useful, think in terms of the bigger picture, reframe things so that you’re better because of your differences, work to change yourself if you want to. But most of the book was part autobiography (the author moved to Texas from Russia when she was a child, and always felt different in America), part narratives of many people who were also weirdos in their various milieus (a doctor with dwarfism, a trans woman in conservative Texas, a male preschool teacher, a female racecar driver, a conservative in California, etc.). I’m not saying that any of the mini-biographies were bad, per se – Khazan is a good and evocative writer – it’s just not what I expected from a book whose promise is to make me feel better about being weird. Instead, I feel more-or-less the same, just with a bunch of other people’s weirdness stories rattling around in my head now too. Altogether, I’m kinda meh on this one.