“Brown,” as in Brené Brown, is mentioned forty-two times in Melissa Petro’s investigative memoir, Shame on You: How to Be a Woman in the Age of Mortification (288 pages; Putnam). It’s not surprising. Few people are as connected with studying shame as Brown, whose 2011 TED talk “The power of vulnerability” and subsequent books catalyzed an anti-shame movement. Yet shame, as Petro states, “remains no less pervasive today than it was ten, twenty, or even thirty years ago.”  Seven out of ten teenage girls are ashamed of their bodies; seventy-five percent of executive women feel imposter syndrome; three out of four working mothers believe they are failing at their work-life balance. And this is the tip of the shame iceberg. “So why aren’t we feeling good about ourselves?” asks Petro. “Why has our culture of shame only gotten worse?”

Over the course her memoir, Petro relays her journey from bookish schoolgirl from a low-income household to college student working as a part-time stripper and, later, as a sex worker, to public-school teacher shamed into relinquishing her job after penning a HuffPost article about her past and freelance writer and stay-at-home mother to a special needs child. The prologue to Shame on You, which recounts Petro’s public resignation from the New York Department of Education after the New York Post ran a front-page spread headlined “Bronx Teacher Admits: I’m an Ex-Hooker,” is particularly moving, the injustice as palpable as mud.

Shame, even as it applies only to women or femmes, is a hopelessly broad topic. Petro fills in the gaps of her personal experience with anecdotes from interviewed women and quotes from a range of sources, including, but not limited to, Amanda Montrei’s Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, & Control, Adrienne Marie Brown’s Pleasure Activism, and You Are Your Best Thing (an anthology of Black writers sharing on shame, edited by Tarana Burke and Brené Brown).

At times, this tactic feels inadequate and far reaching, with Petro shoehorning too much into a single chapter. Other times, the combination is electrifying, sounding a chord that is far more than the sum of its notes. The strategy is most effective in Petro’s chapter “Entertainment Tonight,” which weaves the distressing stories of “contemporary jezebels” (Amber Heard, Anita Hill, Monica Lewinsky, Pamela Anderson) with those of women gawked over for their violent crimes (such as Lorena Bobbit, who cut off her husband’s penis after years of domestic abuse) and with Petro’s own experience in the public pillory.

Her insights into why the public obsesses over stories of women behaving badly are scintillating. “With all the suppression and self-censure,” she writes, “there is a ravenous public appetite for stories about women who defy the rules. And it is no wonder the audience, and women in particular, feel pulled in by these narratives. All those urges we so deeply resisted. All the times we didn’t. She did.” Her words sing with clarity and purpose. “Bad” women are mocked not because they are laughable, but because they produce envy and fear.

Shame on You does not make a case for why shame has increased—if indeed it has—over the past two or more decades. It’s possible that the internet and social media have played a role in bringing us face to face with our worst shames on a more regular basis, while isolating us from antidotes to shame like grounded, real-life friendships and communities. This factor is intimated in Petro’s book but never explicitly analyzed. What Shame on You does make clear is that systemic reinforcers of women’s shame (namely, late capitalism under patriarchy) are powerful and deeply entrenched. For this reason, even after Brené Brown (and everyone who paved the way before her), there can never be enough books about shame and shame resilience—or about women who’ve been burned at the stake and lived to write about it.

Mieke Marple is an artist and writer living in Los Angeles. A contributor to ZYZZYVA, she has also written for The Huffington Post, Lit Hub, ArtNews, and Artsy, among others.