“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 […]

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