“In my defense, it was never my intent to write this book.”
So begins Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World. It all began when Klein, the liberal activist and blockbuster writer behind bestsellers like The Shock Doctrine and This Changes Everything, became regularly mistaken for Naomi Wolf, the liberal feminist author of The Beauty Myth turned conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer. The similarities between Klein and “Other Naomi” seemed uncanny: “We both write big-idea books,” Klein writes, and “have brown hair that sometimes goes blond from over-highlighting.” At times, the overlap is stranger than fiction: for instance, both women are married to men named Avram. Amid a decade of defending her own reputation against Wolf’s escalating conservatism, Klein tail-spinned into obsession, tracking Wolf’s right-wing media appearances in a quest to understand her “flight from reality.” But the book’s outlook is far broader than Klein’s own doppelgänger trouble. “The book is not about my doppelgänger; my doppelgänger is just the white rabbit leading me down the rabbit hole,” she tells Esquire. It's very much about what I find down there, who else I find down there, and what it says about us.”
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