Review by Booklist Review
As a single mom on the precipice of 50, Sales downloads Tinder on a whim. She invites readers to embark on a swipe-by-swipe voyeuristic odyssey through her romantic misadventures, dick pics and all. She quickly levels up from dating app amateur to expert. As an award-winning journalist, she investigates the so-called dating revolution brought on by Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, and others. She interviews people from all walks of life about their online dating horror stories, unveiling the dark side of contemporary dating culture. Sales has filmed an HBO documentary and often writes thoughtful articles that analyze the harm caused by Big Dating, an industry that profits from loneliness and heartbreak. A breath of fresh air, she doesn't hold back when it comes to critiquing online dating, and she shares her own experience with equally brutal honesty. Sales nails the confounding ordeal of grappling with singledom and COVID-19 at the same time, a unique aspect of this book that will resonate with many readers. Relatable, hilarious, heart-breaking, and eye-opening, Nothing Personal is an updated Sex and the City.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Sales (American Girls) gets plenty personal in this candid and provocative memoir investigating Big Tech's disruptions of dating. She argues that dating apps--rife with harassment, powered by algorithms that reinforce racial bias, and designed to be addictive by data-mining companies--are undermining real connection. Yet, approaching age 50 and reeling from recent heartbreak, she's hardly immune to these "problematic little cattle prods of desire" and embarks on a series of often terrible hookups with 20 some-odd men, including one guy who takes a call from his mom mid-coitus and another who insists that "all girls like being choked." She eventually finds hot, intimate sex with Abel, but ghosting is a frequent feature of their on-and-off "situationship," and an act of casual objectification becomes the final straw. Supporting her own experiences with statistics and quotes from researchers, tech execs, and fellow daters, Sales touches on everything from "incels" (members of online "involuntary celibate" communities) to sex robots; the linkages can occasionally strain, as in an analogy between a narrowing of dating experiences and the loss of biodiversity. But Sales's funny, fresh approach will resonate with many single readers, as well as anyone concerned about the ways technology enables capitalism to invade personal lives. Agent: Jen Marshall, Aevitas Creative (May)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Despite the title, a very personal--and thoroughly researched--memoir of dating younger men. In this warm, witty, and rigorously honest memoir, a "Confessions of an English Opium-Eater--type exposé on dating apps," Sales takes us behind the scenes of her work as a journalist and filmmaker and her own experiences with Tinder. The most affecting of these involved a mostly irresistible, sometimes disappointing young man she calls Abel, 23 to her 49 when they met, with whom she remained involved for four years, while both continued swiping and hooking up with others. The author, "a single mom by choice," managed to keep her daughter, Zazie, in the dark about her love life--thank God for summer camp--and relied on a supportive network of friends and the proprietors of her neighborhood bar and cafe to help her keep some perspective on her experiences. Ironically, the same year she met Abel, Sales went to war with Tinder by publishing in Vanity Fair what was apparently the first article to criticize the dating app. The company fought back with a smear campaign, but Sales continued working--and dating. On the memoir side, Sales writes engagingly about her parents and her coming-of-age in Florida waiting tables in their hippie diner, and she takes us through some failed relationships, her successful journalism career, and stories of dating during the pandemic. The personal narrative is illuminated by often chilling research--e.g., a 2014 Harvard Business School study that "should dispel any notion that millennial men 'see women as equals' " or a 2019 survey that found "31 percent of the women…reported being sexually assaulted or raped by someone they had met through an online dating site. Sales makes it abundantly clear that it's not pretty out there. Against all odds, this unsparing, must-read portrait of modern dating and sex is also a love story. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
