Similarly so, as a memoirist, Palin believes her appeal lays in her common tongue. She ventures no opinions we have not heard before, from all our neighbors and friends; she formulates no thoughts that couldn’t be expressed by a high school coach, or by the master of ceremonies at a state fair. And so her book is devoid of psychology, or subtlety. The sublime hatreds, the wafting regret, the recurrent dreaming, the stuff of human life: they are absent from this book. She is willing to talk about her labor pains when she had her first child, she is willing to tell us about her fights with her husband—but only in the peppy and off-handed tone that co-workers and causal acquaintances use when they want to discourage further questions. She sounds like one of us, and so fails to justify consuming our attention. Readers want a literature to be superior company.