"The book is thronged with detail, but of a careful kind....There are a few more piquant moments as she ages and an appealing harshness and humor enter the pages, but she isn’t writing to know herself or to be known. She has another, more complicated project in mind....The diary can be a way of learning to watch yourself, [Wolf] suggests, instead of watching or imagining yourself being watched. It’s can be a way of reaffirming contact with the self—and then, more radically, finding within its enclosure a more idiosyncratic, more personal way of marking and possessing time before it has its way with us."

New York Times Book Review

"...Brilliant yet deceptively simple formal constraint, as well as a keen eye for the many different facets of existence. She’s able to paint the intimate details of her life against a larger political and intellectual backdrop of which she herself, as the preeminent writer of East Germany, was very much a part.... Rather than finely drawn portraits or expertly crafted anecdotes, the precise geometry of the book lends itself to a compelling way of looking at time, a layering of days that are sometimes barely discernible from one another."

Los Angeles Review of Books