“Shame on you: How to be a Woman in the Age of Mortification,” by Melissa Petro, walks the line between memoir and self-help well. In it, Petro writes about her own background — she lost her job as a teacher due to her past as a sex worker — while also interviewing a variety of women about their experiences with shame.

Yet whether you enjoy this book will depend so much on who you are, where you come from, your age, your upbringing and what you already know about feminism. For some, it might be the most enlightening book ever written. Others might feel as though someone would have to be living under a rock to not know the basic primer of shame and feminism.

To each her own.

I seldom insert myself into reviews, but in this case I must assert my own biases: I am a cisgender, white woman of privilege who, like Petro, has a special needs child. I am a quintessential Gen Xer, who was told as a child that women could have it all, but who grew up to understand very quickly that was absolutely not true.

Womanhood can be fraught. This plays out in Petro’s book, as she explores the nooks and crannies of shame that pervade our lives.

While Petro’s recollections of her own life are certainly captivating, and hearing voices of women from around the country can be gratifying and fulfilling, there is nothing groundbreakingly original or insightful about this book. It does not espouse new ideas as much as it covers ground that has already been explored by what Petro calls “the anti-shame movement” and economy.

As far as feminist literature goes, this book probably won’t make readers stand up and yell in solidarity. While the book provides valuable insights into the concept of shame and its impact on women, it could benefit from a more nuanced analysis.

Stilted sentences and awkward transitions from interviews to her own ideas make the book’s structure feel a little uneven. The book balances wanting to pinpoint the origins of female shame and its cures, which can feel unfocused.

The focus on individual empowerment and self-care, while valuable, might not be sufficient to address the root causes of women’s shame. This is not to say that is what Petro set out to do, yet a reader might be frustrated that this book — while seemingly a call to feminist equity — lacks depth. It could have easily explored the intersectionality of gender with other social identities, such as race, class and sexuality.

Still, if anyone knows about enduring shame it’s Petro — she received dumpsters of shame, on the cover of the New York Post no less, for being a stripper and prostitute before she became a school teacher. The memoir portions are earnest and real; one has to give due recognition to the difficulty of revisiting some of the things Petro lived through.

Petro effectively highlights the ways in which societal norms and expectations contribute to women’s shame (and women everywhere will nod along with example after example), even as she walks the line between understanding the unique challenges faced by women from marginalized groups and keeping her book narratively on track.

This memoir often leads the reader down the path of hope then leaves her to figure things out on her own, which can leave the reader with emotional whiplash: one moment women are crushing the patriarchy and the next, we are helpless.

Then again, perhaps that journey was the point? This is the shame that jolts us. This is the shame that drops us off the edge of a roller coaster cliff, and Petro is there with us, for the ride.

Meredith Cummings is a freelance journalist and teaching assistant professor of journalism at Lehigh University.