“Reality who?”

I’m still shocked that I didn’t know who Reality Winner was prior to reading her memoir, I Am Not Your Enemy. After all, stage plays and documentaries have been produced about her, and her story was featured on an episode of “Full Frontal with Samantha Bee.” Yet, in the madness that was the 2017 news cycle, I completely missed the saga of the 25-year-old Air Force veteran who, while working as a translator for the National Security Agency, leaked a classified document about Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election.

What’s infuriating about my lapse is that the names Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning pop into my brain effortlessly. All three whistleblowers, at the time of their own high-profile actions, were straight-passing men, while Winner is not. And whereas Snowden’s leak, for one, was handled by journalists who made sure he’d be protected, a low-level reporter at the Intercept almost immediately turned Winner’s material over to the NSA. She would go on to be convicted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to 10 years in federal prison. Ultimately, she served four.

Her memoir brings depth and color to her story, but whether it’s effective as a piece of art is, like the author herself, hard to pin down. On one hand, Winner, in all her complexity, comes through on the page as a compelling character. Her writing about her early fraught relationship with her father (who struggled with addiction), her fascination with Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, and her love of animals brings humanizing detail to the person behind the headlines.

On the other, the book’s pacing is often stilted and the prose stiff. She focuses a bit too much on her Texas childhood but not enough on her experience learning foreign languages (a trained linguist, she speaks Farsi, Dari, and Pashto). There’s quite a bit about boot camp but very little about her time in the Air Force’s controversial drone program, which clearly affected her deeply. And the book’s straightforward, linear form — while a trusty way to convey information — lacks reflection and often feels like a slog.

The benefit of long-form writing like memoir is the opportunity it gives readers to dive deeply into another person’s life. As a reader, I wanted to feel the coats of the dog and cat Winner had to leave behind in her home the day she was arrested. I wanted to discover her favorite Farsi words and smell the inside of the courtroom. But we’re not invited in. It’s almost like the lack of description is meant to keep us at arm’s length; we can listen to the text of the story, but we’re unable to hear its music.

Still, there’s much about the book that makes it worthwhile. For fans of legal procedurals, I Am Not Your Enemy is a must-read. Its meticulous reliance on transcripts is fascinating, and watching the justice system fail Winner over and over is both harrowing and infuriating.

When Winner is in the county jail, she jokes with her lawyer that she’s going to write a memoir about her incarceration someday. Ironically, it’s at this point that the book finally hits its stride. The writing about the food, the crappy beds, the humiliation, and how the trauma of it all impacted her bulimia is riveting. Even better are the passages about her cellmates, who are complicated and colorful. She even writes about their use of language in interesting ways.

Another irresistible thing about this memoir is the sheer Millennial-ness of it. Born in 1991, Winner is fully part of that generation, and her references often match. Her understanding of incarceration, for instance, is primed by the Netflix series “Orange Is the New Black” and documentary “13th.” Often, Millennials are accused of being entitled keyboard warriors who both never grew up and never act on their supposed principles. Winner’s tale refutes that narrative, while the CrossFit references and cartoons she throws in give it some zing.

In the end, even if her motives were a bit fuzzy and her actions impulsive, she proves herself to be the kind of person we very much need to prevent fascism: a troublemaker. She’s one of the brave souls willing to gum up the works for those who would grab absolute power. No matter what people say, Reality Winner did her part, and she paid dearly for it.

Gretchen Lida is an essayist and an equestrian. She is a contributing writer to the Independent and Horse Network. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Rumpus, the Lost Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She is also recipient of the 2024 Paul Somers Prize for Creative Prose from the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.