The Female Complaint is part of Lauren Berlant s groundbreaking national sentimentality project charting the emergence of the U.S. political sphere as an affective space of attachment and identification. In this book, Berlant chronicles the origins and conventions of the first mass-cultural intimate public in the United States, a women s culture distinguished by a view that women inevitably have something in common and are in need of a conversation that feels intimate and revelatory. As Berlant explains, women s books, films, and television shows enact a fantasy that a woman s life is...