"This is a sparkling biography--not just of a pair of remarkable women, but of a popular personality tool. Merve Emre deftly exposes the hidden origins of the MBTI and the seductive appeal and fatal flaws of personality types. Ultimately, she reveals that a sense of self is less something we discover, and more something we create and revise." -- Adam Grant , New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg

"Genius, passion, insight, love, heartbreak, war, family, competition, corporate villainy: the story of the Myers-Briggs personality assessment, and the extraordinary mother-daughter duo who conceived and developed it, has all the stuff of a great novel, with the added advantage that it's true. Chances are you didn't know that Myers and Briggs were women. In the tradition of Hidden Figures , this brilliant book proves--yet again--that women were behind some of the most important scientific innovations of wartime and postwar America. I absolutely love it." -- Liza Mundy , author of the national bestseller Code Girls

"Merve Emre pulls back the curtain on the world of personality testing and the mother-daughter duo whose work catapulted the field into a movement. The Personality Brokers is a fluid mix of history, research, and first hand reporting that speaks to both true believers and skeptics alike. With her engaging and persuasive narrative, Emre elucidates how personality testing became a cultural force, one whose influence persists." -- Nathalia Holt , New York Times bestselling author of Rise of the Rocket Girls

"Scholar and trenchant literary critic Emre uses archival research to tell this story, revealing the fictions woven into a supposedly 'scientific' instrument." -- The Millions

"An illuminating dual biography...Emre has dug deeply into published and archival sources to produce a deft, gracefully written account of Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Myers...a discerning history of the quest for self-knowledge." -- Kirkus Reviews

"[Emre] tells the fascinating story of the origins of the world's most widely used personality test...she is excellent at recounting how the MBTI began to sweep American institutions in the 1950s. [A] fine study." -- Publishers Weekly

"This combined dual biography and social history seeks explanations for why an admittedly flawed, unscientifically proven personality test--created in the 1920s by a mother-daughter team of two untrained pseudointellectuals--continues to be the most revered personality indicator in existence...[T]his eye-opening account gives readers insight into how one evaluation method morphed into a neat, satisfying packaging system for our complicated psyches." -- Booklist