Out from Under: Sober Dykes and Our Friends by Jean Swallow
Published 1983 · 65,725 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Essays & Criticism, Memoir & Autobiography, Feminist Literature
How hard is Out from Under: Sober Dykes and Our Friends to read?
Out from Under: Sober Dykes and Our Friends scores 22 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it relatively accessible. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- An anthology of personal essays on recovery from addiction by lesbian writers, aimed at a community readership, most likely written in plain, direct everyday language. Nothing in the evidence points to specialised or archaic vocabulary, so it sits near the accessible end, like The Diary of a Young Girl in directness.
- Sentence structure: 30 out of 100
- Testimonial and reflective essays in a collection published by a feminist press usually rely on conversational, first-person sentences. The evidence suggests clear syntax without elaborate subordination.
- Abstraction: 35 out of 100
- The book is built on lived experience of getting sober and living as a lesbian, so it stays close to personal accounts rather than theory. Some reflection on identity and recovery is likely, but concrete experience leads, much as in Atomic Habits.
- Information density: 30 out of 100
- A 65,725-word collection of multiple contributors' essays should move at a comfortable pace, with each piece centred on one person's experience. It is not a reference work and carries little technical load.
How Out from Under: Sober Dykes and Our Friends is regarded
Out from Under: Sober Dykes and Our Friends holds a literary regard score of 34 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.