Sullivan wisely frames this reader response essay as a “teaching moment” in which Ellen is the teacher and Sullivan the student, and she points out that she has learned to see how Ellen’s resistance to the memoir suggests “Ellen has been the unwilling subject of her own life story and hence she is its reluctant [and resistant] narrator” (p. 43). Moreover, she refers to Ellen’s desire to escape her past and characterizes that desire as a drive “to save her life” (p. 43), but rather than suggest that this need to save her life indicates a problem with personal writing and the memoir, Sullivan instead insists that “[h]er argument against personal writing becomes, in effect, a powerful argument for personal writing” (emphasis added, p. 44). Instead of problematizing the assignment, Sullivan problematizes the way teachers respond to resistances, to students’ assertions of agency and authority in the composition classroom, suggesting with Henry Giroux that educators need to “provide the conditions for students to speak so that their narratives can be affirmed and engaged along with the consistencies and contradictions that characterize such experiences” (Giroux, 1988, p. 18 as cited in Sullivan, p. 53). Such a response is frustrating. While on the one hand, Sullivan appears to be advocating for educators taking a closer look at the content as well as the impulses of student writing, an argument with which I fully concur, on the other hand, she completely ignores how the content and impulses of Ellen’s reader response shape her refusal to participate in the memoir writing asked of her, a refusal made all the more poignant because Ellen makes it clear she is aware of the potential academic costs of her refusal. In other words, Sullivan’s critique suggests there is value (primarily to teachers, it appears) in students telling the stories of their traumas without fully investigating the costs to the students of doing so.