Review: How to Not Always Be Working

Title: How to Not Always Be Working: A Toolkit for Creativity and Radical Self-Care

Author: Marlee Grace

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Divorce (mention)

Back Cover:

Part workbook, part advice manual, part love letter, How to Not Always Be Working gently ventures into the liminal space where phone meets life, helping readers to define their work (aka what they do out of a sense of purpose), their job (aka what they do to make money), and their breaks (what they do to recharge, to keep sacred, to feel connected to themselves). The book delves into the discussion of what happens when your work and your job are connected or the same, and how to figure out how much is to much, and get the best use of your time.

For the corporate lawyer who is always on email as well as the bread-baker trying to something that’s just for themselves, How to Not Always Be Working includes practical suggestions such as getting a phone box and sleeping with your phone in a different room, and more philosophical prompts that invite readers to ask how they burn themselves out and why they’re doing it. A creative manifesto, this book is above all inclusive – insisting that deep breathing and yoga aren’t just for the 1 percent, and inviting any and everyone to create a scared space in their lives.

Review:

I don’t think the title of this book could have called to me any more if it was titled “Jay Needs To Read This Book.” I am generally always working. Most people assume it’s because I have three jobs. But though I do actually need two jobs to pay the bills, the third one is optional and voluntary. I have the time to not be working if I actually knew how to not always be working. I just have some sort of compulsion towards always doing something, and that something is almost always some variety of work.

I was so excited about the premise of this book that I actually paused when I got to the first exercise to do the exercise (which I’ve only ever done for one other book – generally I read books all the way through and then come back to any exercises). But that actually became the problem here. The first exercise was to write out a list of things that are your work. My list included items like “mending clothing,” “social media” (because, as one of my jobs is digital marketing, I’m hardly ever on social media if I’m not getting paid for it), and “most activities that happen in the kitchen.” Then I looked at the sample list Marlee provided, which included items like “balancing the books,” “posting on Instagram about a new product,” and “uploading a new podcast episode.” And realized that I had fundamentally misunderstood who this book is actually targeted at.

This book was not really written for people like me, who take extra jobs even though we don’t need them and who are always working because we have an undefinable, insatiable, irrational drive to always be “productive.” It’s targeted towards people who are self-employed in creative or hobby businesses or influencer-type gigs and who have a hard time drawing the lines between “I’m doing this for work because X is my job” and “I’m doing this for me because I enjoy X.” It is, fundamentally, about figuring out how and where to draw boundaries when your life and your hobbies are your work. (This is, obviously, not my situation. Besides reading, I don’t really have any hobbies. I was hoping this book would teach me how to change that.)

I’m sure this book would be valuable for people in that particular situation. I did finish it, and though it’s definitely influenced strongly by Marlee’s New Age-style witchy spirituality, a lot of the advice is very good and the exercises are practical. Honestly, I would probably find some of the exercises helpful anyway. But I haven’t done any besides the first one yet because I’m just so disillusioned with this book. I really love the principle and the idea and the concept and the call towards not always working. But I didn’t expect such a narrow focus on specific types of work. I probably will take the time to go back through the exercises and see what ideas I can extract and re-shape to fit my life. But sometimes you just don’t want to have to do that work, you know?

Review: A Recipe for More

Title; A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease

Author: Sara Elise

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Drug use, alcohol use, self-harm (mentions), religious trauma (mentions), discussions of sexual practices (no actual sex), mental illness, child abuse (mentions)

Back Cover:

In this expansive book of compassionate wisdom and self-reflection, entrepreneur and “pleasure doula” Sara Elise uncovers the powerful – and often unexamined – forces that keep us in a state of survival and limitation, and asks us to consider a new way to live.

A Recipe for More: Ingredients for a Life of Abundance and Ease is an invitation to reimagine the ingredients of our lives, those essential components that make up our days. Have we chosen rest, breath, movement, agency, visibility, play, and pleasure? Or are we trapped in the numbing and violent pattern of self-inflicted suffering? Do we celebrate the unique and precious wiring of our brains? Are our relationships a garden of ever-growing and evolving roots? Do we nourish our bodies with what they require to sense and receive? Are we liberated, awakened, and alive? As a Black & Indigenous, autistic, queer woman, Sara Elise makes a radial argument for dismantling the systems that oppress us. But it begins with the individual, and the simple recipe of our every day.

Groundbreaking, persuasive, inclusive, and warm – and written in the tradition of authors like adrienne maree brown and Sonya Renee Taylor – A Recipe for More brings the ingredients of an abundant life to all readers so that we might honor ourselves, deepen our communities, and finally be present in each miraculous and life-giving moment.

Review:

I had really high hopes for this book. The title and back cover sound exactly like something I’m looking for, and I was excited for the perspective that a queer, autistic, polyamorous, and Black & Indigenous author primarily doing creative-type work could bring to the ideas. And as much as I have some reservations about the entire self-help genre, I am still vulnerable to the appeal of the modern iteration of self-help – the kind where instead of teaching you how to do it all, succeed at work, “win” capitalism, etc., they’re teaching you how to enjoy life, experience inner peace, free yourself from the pressures and hurry of capitalism, etc. I know it’s basically the same ideas repackaged for a generation that cares more about personal fulfillment than career success, but there’s still a part of me that wants a book to tell me how to feel pleasure again.

Anyway. That’s what led me to pick up this book and expect to enjoy it immensely. But reading it is such a strange experience. Sara Elise clearly has some deep, interesting ideas and thoughts on how best to live life. But I couldn’t really identify what exactly she was trying to say in this book.

Sara Elise is very deeply into things my skeptic husband describes as “woo” – energy healing, astrology, higher powers/Universe Energies, manifestation, Earth wisdom, drugs as a method of spiritual healing, that kind of thing. I mean this in the nicest way possible, but I get strong “Tumblr witch” vibes. (Admittedly, I myself spent a few years as a Tumblr witch, so I at least didn’t have any trouble parsing some of the unusual phrases and ideas here.) Though I’m still open to some woo, she is way beyond what most people would consider a reasonable amount of it. It’s obviously working really well for her, which is great. But if you’re not as far as she is on the skeptic-woo spectrum, you’ll probably be weirded out by some of this.

Although honestly, there’s a lot in here to be weirded out by that’s not woo. Sara talks about her commitment to being open and vulnerable. And that includes being extremely, uncomfortably open in this book. If feels like the book form of that person who you just met five minutes ago but is already telling you about their childhood trauma, the years when they did as many drugs as they could get their hands on, and how much they’re into BDSM. (All things Sara talks about in this book.) There is a place to be open about your personal struggles and/or sexual proclivities in your book, and that can be done really effectively. But since very little of it seemed to connect to an actual point, I ended up with the same very-uncomfortable-but-don’t-want-to-be-rude feeling that you get when someone starts talking about how their parent abused them on a first date. I barely know you and I’m trying to find out if this connection is worth pursuing – why are you telling me about your BDSM parties and how your father used to beat you?

I think my biggest criticism of the book is that I am really not sure what it’s trying to say. The chapter titles and subheadings have some standard self-help concepts (“Give Yourself Permission to Change,” “The Myth of Productivity”) and some slightly more interesting concepts (“Invest in Your Pleasure,” “Allowing Good Feelings”). I think if you took the headings and used them as an outline to write a longform article, you’d get something with more clarity and a more direct point. There’s so many different types of content packed into 220 pages that it’s hard to combine the variety into something cohesive.

And when I say “types” of content, I do mean types. This isn’t just Sara Elise writing a book about a topic. That part is definitely there, but it’s also interspersed with a lot of other things.

• There are short essays written by other people, several of whom I think are her romantic partners, which range from actually quite interesting (“A Journey in Black Minimalism”) to vaguely incomprehensible (“Natural State”).
• There’s a black-and-white reproduction of an oil painting self-portrait of someone else.
• There’s a literal recipe (for a Roasted Squash and Garlic Ricotta Buckwheat Galette).
• There’s instructions for how to eat something delicious. I actually read this one to my husband, and he described it as “woo meets vore.”
• The second-to-last chapter is almost entirely a “minimally edited” transcription of a conversation between Sara and some of her friends, but it feels more like a literary device than an actual conversation. (One example, starting on page 190: “Our queered model and practice of friendship defies the way that freedom gets defined by whiteness and by capitalism, so the dominant culture that we’re living in defines freedom as an island and that being free means unaccountable and being able to do whatever you want.” Interesting philosophy? Yes. A sentince I can imagine a real human being saying while talking with friends? No.)
• There’s a ton of other people quoted in this book. These include bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Gary Vaynerchuk, Oprah, books like Wintering and Do Nothing, various Instagram accounts, and assorted podcast episodes. It gave the whole book a strange sense of trying to be academic by including a bunch of citations, but also failing because half the time the citation is just something somebody said on social media.
• There’s also a variety of reflection questions scattered throughout the book, and they’re the only actually actionable thing in it.

I think my fundamental problem here is that I went in thinking this was something it’s not. I was expecting and hoping for a how-to – for Sara to give me the ingredients for me to cook up my own life of abundance and ease. But that’s not really what this book is about. I think it’s more a combination of life philosophy and memoir. Despite what the title seems to imply, Sara isn’t here to tell you how you can do this for yourself. Instead, she’s here to share her philosophy on living, experiencing life and its sensory pleasures, working within and embracing the unique constraints of an autistic and ADHD brain, feeling abundance, and adding more ease into existence, and also share a radically open story of how she built this philosophy and uses it in her own life.

Despite how critical this review has been, I don’t want to be overly hard on this book. Most of my complaints came from my own expectations and desires for a how-to manual. I think if I had known in advance that it was more a work of personal philosophy, I would have looked at it with different eyes and maybe been better able to see what’s actually there. Because I do feel like there’s something worthwhile here. I just wasn’t able to grasp it.

Review: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was

Title: I Could Do Anything If I Only Knew What It Was: How to Discover What You Really Want and How to Get it

Author: Barbara Sher with Barbara Smith

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Cisnormativity, heteronormativity, parent death (mentions), spouse death (mentions), child abuse (mentions), emotional abuse (mentions)

Back Cover:

If you suspect there could be more to life than what you’re getting, if you always knew you could do anything—if you only knew what it was—this extraordinary book is about to prove you right. No matter what your age, no matter how “unattainable” your dreams, you can create and live a life you love.

I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was reveals how you can recapture “long lost” goals, overcome the blocks that inhibit your success, decide what you want to be, and live your dreams forever. You will learn:

• What to do if you never chose to be what you are.
• How to get off the fast track—and on to the right track.
• First aid techniques for paralyzing chronic negativity.
• How to regroup when you’ve lost your big dream.
• To stop waiting for luck—and start creating it.

A life without direction is a life without passion. I Could Do Anything If Only I Knew What It Was guides you not to another unsatisfying job but to a richly rewarding career rooted in your heart’s desire.

Review:

I had some reservations about this book, as I read Barbara Sher’s Refuse to Choose! several years ago and found it occasionally insightful but overall unimpressive. But the title of this book called me so dramatically that it might have well have been called Jay Needs to Read This Book. I have often said that my biggest problem in getting anything done is that I genuinely could get good at almost anything, I just don’t know what I want to do. So I decided to give this book a try.

I’m not sure what Barbara Smith contributed to this book, because the writing style is most definitely Barbara Sher’s. Like Refuse to Choose!, it spent the first part of the book establishing the idea and laying general ground rules, and then the rest of the book examining detailed ideas for different people depending on what specific issue they were dealing with. And I think it did it significantly better. Refuse to Choose! felt like it was introducing a concept, but this one felt more like it was providing advice and solutions, so the whole book worked better. The book uses a ton of specific examples of people Barbara has helped work through the processes she recommends, which solves my biggest issue with the other book: I still don’t know where Barbara gets her ideas, but at least the examples provided some authority. Whatever other kind of expertise and experience she has, at least the examples show her methods do work in some cases. It’s also packed to the gills with practical exercises no matter what is really holding you back, which I deeply appreciate.

And now I’m done with the comparison part of the review, and we can actually talk about what’s in this book. Because there’s a lot.

Barbara identifies ten different reasons why you might be struggling to pursue or even identify what you want:

• Fear of leaving less-successful loved ones behind
• Too many interests to make progress on any of them
• Busy making a lot of progress, but not on something you want
• What you really want is something you don’t think you “should” want
• Recent graduate intimidated by choosing the course of the rest of your life
• Radical life change (good or bad) and you aren’t sure what to do in general
• Already achieved your dream, then lost it forever due to circumstances out of your control
• Never find anything interesting
• Doing anything other than your dream (even the work to get to your dream) is too frustrating
• Trying really hard to want something even though it’s not really what you want

Personally, I relate most to the second one – way too many diverse interests to really focus on any of them. (If I spend all my time writing, I’ll never sew; if I sew all the time, I won’t have the energy to grow my business; if I focus on growing my business, I won’t have time to study for a Master’s degree; if I’m studying for a Master’s degree, I won’t feel like studying IT … you get the picture.) But I read every section, and all of them have great advice.

I really appreciate how Barbara focuses on the underlying emotions. You can’t force yourself to feel (or not feel) something, and you don’t get a whole lot of say in what your heart desires. Some of the reasons you’re struggling to find what you want and pursue it she ties back to childhood trauma (which, as a person who’s done a lot of reading on trauma and its effects, made a lot of sense to me.) Others she tied to family dynamics, emotional states, or thinking patterns you didn’t realize you learned. And she provides so many exercises to do, some by themselves and some sequentially, to help you feel and process your emotions. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a self-help book about hobbies and careers be this emotionally aware, and I am impressed.

I even paused reading for a bit to actually do one of the exercises in the “too many interests” chapter. As much as I appreciate exercises, I very rarely do them while reading – generally I read the whole book and then go back. But this one I did stop reading to do, and it was enlightening.

The funniest thing about this reading experience is that even though this book is astonishingly insightful, emotionally-aware, and almost therapy-like, very little of this is actually revolutionary. Barbara’s main skill here is helping you get in touch with your own feelings about things or pointing out the obvious that an impartial observer can see much better than someone close to the issue. I’ll use the most dramatic one for me, from chapter six (“I Want Too Many Things; I’m All Over the Map”). The problem here is the person who likes too many things to stick with one. Barbara outlines the issue, and then says, “Hm. What if you did everything you want to do, just not all at once?”

When you think about it, that’s extremely logical and fairly obvious advice. None of the things I want to do are mutually exclusive, and there’s no rule that says I have to focus on only one of them. But somehow that idea had never occurred to me before. So much of self-help content is about doing everything, and we tend to assume that if we’re not actively doing something we don’t like it. So it felt revolutionary for someone to say, “Yeah, you can not write a word for several months while you focus on sewing a bunch of stuff, that’s fine.” The exercise I did had me make a list of all the different “lives” I would like to live (I came up with 12) and then analyze what I could do in a year, two years, twenty minutes a day, and other timeframes. And you know, it turns out I can do everything I want to do – just not all at the same time.

For as great as this book is, there are some parts of it that I don’t love. One is that it’s very career-focused – it pays lip service to the idea of finding a low-effort job and using your free time to do things you love, but the vast majority of it equates “finding what you love” with “finding your dream job.” As someone who doesn’t really have a “dream job” (I simply do not dream of labor), I found that irritating, but as the content was generally good it wasn’t a dealbreaker.

Also, this book was published in 1994, and sometimes it shows its age. There’s a whole section about how getting on this newfangled Internet thing is actually pretty cool and how to find someone to help you out if you don’t think you can get on the internet by yourself. It also includes stories of people with jobs like “word processor,” which apparently in 1994 was a business job held by a person and not a type of software. I would love a 2023 update of this, but since Barbara Sher died in 2020 that seems unlikely.

My final criticism is a general lack of acknowledgement of mental illness. I’m sure it had something to do with the time it was written, but for a book that is as astonishingly emotionally aware and cognizant of issues of grief and childhood trauma, there’s a whole chapter that’s basically “I don’t know what I want because I have chronic/severe depression that includes an inability to experience pleasure in anything” and never once considers depression as a potential issue. Barbara assumes that some sort of childhood problem stymied your ability to be enthusiastic about your career and that is the issue. For some people, it may be. But the way she describes it – “chronic negativity,” “everything looks pointless,” “genuine despair” – sounds a whole lot like a person with clinical depression. She does at least mention that it might be worth seeing a doctor, but the rest of her prescription – exercise, introspection, and “just do something” – may not be incredibly helpful if your issue is mental illness.

All told, this book does have its issues (most of them likely stemming from the fact that it is nearly thirty years old). But it’s also astonishingly useful. This book is everything Refuse to Choose! tried to be – at least a little authoritative, packed with examples, filled with actually useful and compelling exercises, and explaining not only a new idea but what to do with it. It’s definitely not perfect, but it’s great for a very particular type of person. It’s exactly what it says on the tin: If you feel like you could do anything if only someone would tell you what you want to do, this book is for you.

Review: Running on Empty

Title: Running On Empty: Overcoming Your Childhood Emotional Neglect

Author: Dr. Jonice Webb

Genre: Self-Help/Psychology

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, child neglect, mental illness, suicide, suicidal ideation, self-harm (mentions), moralizing about food, diet talk, emotional abuse (mentions)

Back Cover:

Do you sometimes feel as if you’re just going through the motions in life? Are you good at looking and acting as if you’re fine, but secretly feel lonely and disconnected? If so, you are not alone. The world is full of people who have an innate sense that something is wrong with them. Who feel they live on the outside looking in, but have no explanation for their feeling and no way to put it into words. If you are one of these people, you may fear that you are not connected enough to your spouse, or that you don’t feel pleasure or love as profoundly as others do. You may drink too much, or eat too much, or risk too much, in an attempt to feel something good. Running on Empty will give you clear strategies for how to heal, and offers a special chapter for mental health professionals. In the world of human suffering, this book is an Emotional Smart Bomb meant to eradicate the effects of an invisible enemy.

Review:

Before we get into the actual review, I have to add some context. This review is probably going to come off significantly more scathing than I intend, and I’m hoping by providing some context to my comments and the book itself, you’ll have a better idea of where I’m coming from.

First, I’ve been working on the whole “dealing with childhood trauma” thing for eight years, which includes reading a ton of internet articles and many books on related topics. So I’m already incredibly familiar with not just the basics of mental health, childhood trauma, PTSD, and trauma treatment and recovery concepts, but also things like generational trauma, the physical effects of emotional trauma, and interpersonal and capitalistic factors affecting mental health. I would even go as far as to say that there are very few layperson-accessible concepts around mental health and trauma that I haven’t read at least a little about (although if you want to introduce me to something new I’d love to hear about it). So I’m already going into this with a strong foundation.

Second, this book was published in 2012. I didn’t start my journey to work on my childhood trauma and mental health until 2014-2015, so I’m not very familiar with what was going on in that space before then. For all I know, this book was groundbreaking and revolutionary at time of publication. However, I’m reading it a full decade after it was published with eight years of mental health and trauma reading behind me. All of which strongly affected my opinions.

Now let’s do a review.

The whole idea of the first part of this book seems to be built on convincing readers that emotional neglect is an actual thing. It has a “quiz” asking if you’ve experienced any of these symptoms that are common with emotional neglect – although I noticed that many of the questions were phrased so broadly that almost anyone could legitimately say yes. Then there were examples. So, so many examples. Part one discussed the different types of emotionally neglectful parents, and each type was illustrated with examples, often multiple examples.

The book states at the beginning that it’s written for both patients and clinicians. (It clearly also has a third audience of parents who don’t want to emotionally neglect their children, who get a whole chapter in part three but don’t get mentioned as an explicit audience for the book.) I have to assume that clinicians are familiar with many of the concepts involved, and I imagine that patients who seek this book out have some level of awareness about the problems going on. The excessive examples got annoying fast.

This book also implicitly contradicts itself almost constantly. It’s a “do as I say, not as I do” situation – the stated opinions are completely opposite to the tone and attitude of the writing. Part one states to not blame your parents, but then spends the rest of the section teaching you what specifically to blame your parents for. It kept claiming that you don’t have to be perfect to be a good parent, but everything else about the book seemed to say that if you aren’t a perfect parent your child is doomed to loneliness and suicidal ideation.

It keeps telling you that just because you were emotionally neglected in childhood doesn’t mean you’re irreparably broken, but it spends so much time talking about all the different ways emotional neglect damages you that it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that you are irrevocably doomed. It may claim you can heal the damage, but the ratio of “discussion of the damage” to “here’s how to heal yourself” is significantly skewed towards descriptions of the mental anguish and shattered relationships that result from emotional neglect. It spends so much time describing the problem that the solutions feel inadequate, like offering a band-aid for a bullet wound.

The few solutions provided seem better described as “paltry advice” – inspiring but vague, more concepts than action plan, and incredibly meager compared to the sheer volume of pain the book describes. Most of the ideas are things I recognize from the concept of re-parenting yourself. And all of the practical advice is worksheets. Literally all of it. Jonice has some worksheets available on her website and that’s the one tool you get to help overcome a childhood of emotional neglect. I actually was curious about the enjoyment worksheet and went and looked it up, and it turns out they’re not even worksheets. They’re tracking forms. The enjoyment one has boxes for every day of the year and asks you to count how many times you prioritized enjoyment each day. That’s it.

This book really feels like it was trying to introduce a brand new concept into the public consciousness. And perhaps in 2012, it was. But I was aware of the concept of emotional neglect long before I heard of this book (so I guess if that was the goal, it did its job) and found this book-length definition depressing and unhelpful. Emotional neglect is a great concept for both personal and clinical work to identify and describe a particular type of childhood trauma. But while the idea is good and useful, the book itself is not.

Review: How to Keep House While Drowning

Title: How to Keep House While Drowning: A Gentle Approach to Cleaning and Organizing

Author: K.C. Davis

Genre: Self-Help

Trigger Warnings: Mental illness (mentions), fatphobia (mentions), child abuse (mentions)

Back Cover:

After KC Davis gave birth to her second child, she didn’t fold a single piece of laundry for seven months. Between postpartum depression and ADHD, she felt numb and overwhelmed. She regained her sanity—and the functionality of her home—after one life-changing realization:

You don’t work for your home; your home works for you.

In other words, messiness is not a moral failing. A new sense of calm washed over her as she let go of the shame-based messaging that interpreted a pile of dirty laundry as “I can never keep up” and a chaotic kitchen as “I’m a bad mother.” Instead, she looked at unwashed clothes and thought, “I am alive,” and at stacks of dishes and thought, “I cooked my family dinner three nights in a row.”

Building on this foundation of self-compassion, KC devised the powerful practical approach that has exploded in popularity through her TikTok account, @domesticblisters. The secret is to stop following perfectionist rules that don’t make sense for you—like folding clothes that don’t wrinkle anyway, or thinking that every room has to be clean at the same time—and to find creative solutions that accommodate your needs, pet peeves, daily rhythms, and attention span. Inside, you’ll learn exactly how to customize your approach and rebuild your relationship with your home, including: -How to stop seeing care tasks as a reflection of your worth, but rather as kindnesses to your future self

• How to use calming rituals to keep you from feeling overwhelmed when you look at a big mess
• How to stagger tasks that are easy to procrastinate throughout the week and month
• How to quickly transform a room from messy to fully functional through the “5 Things” tidying method, and other shortcuts requiring minimal energy

Read this book to make home feel like a sanctuary again: where you can move with ease, where guilt, self-criticism, and endless checklists have no place, and where you always have permission to rest, even when things aren’t finished.

Review:

I picked this up because the title spoke to me. “Drowning” feels like a very accurate description of my life and my mental and emotional state right now, and housekeeping is most definitely not getting done. I read the beginning of the back cover just to make sure the author wasn’t one of those “your feelings are wrong, run five miles and eat 50 pounds of kale!” types, and when I got to “postpartum depression and ADHD” I decided this author does in fact know what drowning feels like and I needed to read it immediately.

I got this from the library as an audiobook. It’s about three hours long, and since I listen at 1.75x speed I blazed through it in under two hours. The only reason I finished it was because it was so short. I kept mentally telling the book to hurry up – Stop telling me to be nice to myself and get to the part where you give me the strategies for keeping my dishes washed and my floors clean. I got to the end highly disappointed. There were some good ideas for keeping up with the bare minimum to make your house livable, but the bulk of it was about self-compassion, giving up on perfect in favor of functional, and letting yourself do next to nothing if that’s all you can do. I have never been (or, I suppose, have never been allowed to be) a bare-minimum person. I came to this book looking for tools and tips to make sure the dishes get done every day despite being disabled and working 60-70 hours a week. I did not come to this book to be told that I should have compassion for the struggles I’m going through and that removing rust from the barely-used loaf pans doesn’t matter right now. It was very unhelpful and not at all what I wanted.

Then the next day, I read it again. Something about letting the information sit for a day (and reading Tired as F*ck in the meantime) made one particular point sink in. There’s a part in How to Keep House While Drowning where K.C. recommends taking something off your to-do list if you consistently avoid doing it. When she tells that to people, they tend to respond with something like, “But if I take it off my list, it won’t get done!” and she points out that it’s not getting done either way, but if you take it off the list you’re not beating yourself up about it. I’ve been beating myself up over not getting housekeeping stuff done. If it’s not going to get done either way, I might as well not be mean to myself about it.

So I read this book for a second time, and it turns out it’s fantastic. If you can get past the knee-jerk reaction of “I didn’t ask to be told to be nice to myself, I asked for tricks to achieve the impossible standards I hold myself to,” this is exactly what this book’s target audience (myself included) needs to hear.Because between my disability, my two jobs adding up to 70-hour workweeks, and ordinary things like keeping myself fed and showered, who really cares if the computer desk gets a little dusty? I’ve determined that my bare minimum includes keeping one frying pan and one saucepan clean, the kitchen trash not overflowing, enough clear counter space to put a cutting board, the table clear enough to sit down a plate, and a path swept through the main walking areas of the house. If the dirty lemonade pitcher sits on the counter for a few months and a little soap scum builds up on the bathroom sink, oh well. K.C. said her bedroom is a sanctuary because she’s given her bathroom permanent permission to look like a rabid racoon lives there. When you’re drowning, you gotta prioritize. And for me, it’s a lot more important to be able to put a plate on the dining room table than make sure all the pots are washed and put away.

It’s hard to keep this from being a very personal review, because I found this a very personal book. I absoutely would have read it three times if I hadn’t checked it out from the library on a shortened lending period loan. Once I got past the knee-jerk reaction that it wasn’t what I wanted, it was exactly what I needed. It’s not going to tell you the One Magical Secret to achieving your high standards during a rough time. It is going to give you permission to forget about other people’s standards and just do what’s most essential for you right now. And that is invaluable.

Review: Four Thousand Weeks

Title: Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

Author: Oliver Burkeman

Genre: Philosophy/Productivity

Trigger Warnings: Discussions of death and mortality

Back Cover:

The average human lifespan is absurdly, insultingly brief. Assuming you live to be eighty, you have just over four thousand weeks.

Nobody needs telling there isn’t enough time. We’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, our overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and the ceaseless struggle against distraction; and we’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient, and “life hacks” to optimize our days. But such techniques often end up making things worse. The sense of anxious hurry grows more intense, and still the most meaningful parts of life seem to lie just beyond the horizon. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the challenge of how best to use our four thousand weeks.

Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life, showing how many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society–and that we could do things differently.

Review:

This is a bizarre book to review. While I was reading it I found it groundbreaking and earth-shattering, but as soon as I stopped reading for a moment I could no longer remember what was actually so profound about it.

I can’t even really give you a succinct statement on what the book was about, because it was “about” many things. It was about how leisure has become another task, the failure of time management systems, the invention of the modern idea of time during the Industrial Revolution, the creation of meaning through conscious choices, and that you are definitely going to die someday and the end is sooner than it seems. And probably a few other things too, there were a lot of topics in this book.

If I boil it down to a single message, it would be something like, “Life is short and you can’t do everything, so pick what you actually want to do and ignore the rest.” Which is not at all groundbreaking and is a message I’ve heard from a good 80% of self-help products. Oliver does make some good points. He points out that time management systems fail because they’re built on the premise of helping you to do everything when we, as finite mortals, are inherently incapable of doing everything. He also proposes that doing things has meaning because we are choosing to do that with our limited time to the exclusion of all the other things we could do with our time – which is an interesting point to think about, but he uses the example of a marriage having meaning because you chose this one person to the exclusion of all others, and as a polyamorous person that’s not at all what gives my marriage meaning.

I think it’s the way that it’s written that makes this book feel so profound, because every time I put it down the feeling of this book containing incredible deep wisdom completely disappeared. You can’t do everything, and this fact should be obvious. But I suppose we all need reminders every now and then, and this is a good book to remind you of that fact.

Review: Friending

Title: Friending: Creating Meaningful, Lasting Adult Friendships

Author: Gina Handley Schmitt

Genre: Relationships

Trigger Warnings: Abuse (mentions), toxic friendships (mentions)

Back Cover:

Friendships are like any other relationships–when they work, they make our lives better. When they aren’t working, or are hard to find, they make our lives more difficult.

Gina Handley Schmitt saw her therapy clients struggling to make and keep close friends, and wrote this book to help solve what is becoming a full-blown friendship crisis in the age of social media. In this book, you’ll learn:

• How to identify and reach out to potential new friends
• How to maintain long term friendships through busy times and life transitions
• When and how to state your needs and set boundaries with your friends
• Skills for strengthening your friendships by resolving conflicts
• The difficult art of ending a friendship

You’ll do all this using the five core skills of being available, authentic, affirming, assertive, and accepting. Life is so much sweeter with good friends by your side

Review:

I picked up this book because the subtitle promised advice about adult friendships, which is something I really struggle with. I am also a fan of the publisher, Microcosm Publishing, which is a small independent press publishing a fantastic array of useful nonfiction. So I had high hopes.

However, this book didn’t really deliver. There were some tidbits of useful advice, but most of it was well-trod tropes (like the sandwich method for discussing problems) and surface-level discussions. Each of the five core skills in friendships (being available, authentic, affirming, assertive, and accepting) is one section, and each chapter in that section is 2-5 pages long – not nearly long enough to cover anything in depth.

Gina discusses ending friendships when the relationship is toxic, but advises working to keep the friendship in all other cases. She talks about accepting different opinions, but offers no advice on whether it’s worth trying to keep a longstanding friendship with someone who doesn’t think you deserve rights (e.g. you’re gay and your high school bestie is outspokenly homophobic). She seems to be operating under the assumption that every friendship should be a close and intimate friendship and says nothing about how relationships with “my best friend who I tell everything” and “we’re not super close but we play D&D together every other Thursday” should differ.

I guess I just wanted more from this book. It’s a good overview, but that’s all it is. Personally, I think it would have been better as a long-form article than a full book. The five core skills framework was definitely interesting, but most of the content was stuff I’d already heard by googling “how to friendship.” If you really have no idea where to start, this is a good place to do so, but if you’ve done even a modicum of research, look elsewhere.

For more in-depth books about friendships and relationships in general, I highly recommend Set Boundaries, Find Peace (about how to set and maintain boundaries in all relationships) and The Art of Gathering (about how to host fantastic gatherings with friends that deepen your relationships).

Review: The Art of Gathering

Title: The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters

Author: Priya Parker

Genre: Psychology/Relationships

Trigger Warnings: Death (mentions), sexism (mentions), colonization (mentions)

Back Cover:

From the host of the New York Times podcast Together Apart, an exciting new approach to how we gather that will transform the ways we spend our time together–at home, at work, in our communities, and beyond.

In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive–which they don’t have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play.

Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn’t, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings–conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp–and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience.

The result is a book that’s both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue–and how you host and attend them.

Review:

If you’ve ever read any of my nonfiction reviews, you know that I am all about my nonfiction having practical action steps. I’ve been known to stop reading books that might have been perfectly interesting but weren’t giving me practical knowledge. So you will be pleased to know that this book is relentlessly practical.

I put this on hold at the library, and when it finally got around to me about two months after placing the hold, I was skeptical. “Alright, past me,” I was thinking. “This looks like it might be about business meetings and will go into the ‘I only pick up business books on accident’ category, but I’ll give it a shot.”

And then I gave it a shot. And I am so very glad I did, because I am very very bad at people and this book is step-by-step how to have a gathering of people that goes well.

It does discuss business meetings, but it also discusses social gatherings and provides principles that can apply to anything from a conference to having friends over for dinner. Have you considered the power dynamics between guests and host? I didn’t even consider that there was such a thing, but Priya explains (with examples) that there is such a thing, it’s an integral part of the social gathering, there isn’t a way to get rid of it without making your gathering worse, and here’s how to take charge of it to make it a good experience for everyone. Does your gathering have a purpose? No, “hanging out with friends” is not a purpose, but Priya will help you find a good purpose to guide every other decision that goes into planning the meeting. Did you realize that the event starts the moment guests become aware of the gathering and the host having a “pregame” strategy will make the actual event run smoother? Don’t worry, Priya has you covered on that front, too.

Whether you’re hosting a game night with old friends, a dinner party to introduce new friends to a group, a work meeting to discuss departmental conflicts, or a sit-down with Mom and Dad to discuss their end-of-life plans, this book will explain what to consider, provide steps for making it as successful as possible, illustrate with examples from Priya’s work as a professional gathering facilitator, and set you up for a great interpersonal experience.

I cannot express how helpful this knowledge is to me. I am very, very horrible at people (I blame the autism, but limited social interaction as a child didn’t help either), and this book basically said to me, “It’s okay, honey, here’s how people gather, what they expect when they get together, and how use this knowledge to plan a good gathering yourself.” As someone who both does not understand people at all and who married a Dungeon Master and so ends up regularly hosting game nights, I wish I’d found this book years ago.

If you are a human being who spends time with other human beings, this book is guaranteed to be helpful. (Unless you are that magical human being who knows everything in this book instinctively, in which case, I would like to purchase said instincts.) This book is definitely going on the Required Reading page, and I unreservedly recommend it to everyone.

Review: Adult Children of Abusive Parents

Title: Adult Children of Abusive Parents: A Healing Program for Those Who Have Been Physically, Sexually, or Emotionally Abused

Author: Steven Farmer

Genre: Self-Help

I don’t like categorizing this as Self-Help because of the connotations of the modern Self-Help genre, but this is Self-Help in its most basic meaning: A book with practical instructions to help yourself overcome childhood abuse.

Trigger Warnings: Child abuse, child sexual abuse/pedophilia, emotional abuse, physical abuse, child neglect, cisnormative language (descriptions of abuse are extended and often graphic but done with very clinical language and obviously condemned)

Back Cover:

A history of a childhood abuse is not a life sentence. Here is hope, healing, and a chance to recover the self lost in childhood. Drawing on his extensive work with Adult Children, and on his own experience as a survivor of emotional neglect, therapist Steven Farmer demonstrates that through exercises and journal work, his program can help lead you through grieving your lost childhood, to become your own parent, and integrate the healing aspects of spiritual, physical, and emotional recovery into your adult life.

Review:

I was going to start this review with, “I can’t help comparing every book in this vein that I read to The Body Keeps the Score since that was the first one I read on this topic,” but it turns out there’s very few comparisons to be drawn. There are no studies or scientific inquiries in this book, no discussions of past or current research, and no focus on anything beyond the emotional and behavioral aspects of having been abused.

This is a therapy program in a book, basically. It starts off with describing some dynamics different varieties of abusive homes fall into and the different ways you might have responded (the book is written addressing you the former abused child). It discusses how abuse splits you into three “children” inside – your Natural Child, emotionally free, untraumatized, and not reacting to abuse; your Controlling Child, the one who took over to protect you from the abuse and is now making a mess of your adult life; and a third one that I don’t remember because it hardly got mentioned.

The bulk of this book is a step-by-step program to integrate all three “inner children” and let your Natural Child drive the boat most of the time. It’s very comprehensive, not only addressing emotional symptoms but also practical social symptoms like struggling to make friends and being afraid of touch. I think in an ideal world you’d go through this guided by a therapist who can help you deal with things that come up, but therapy is not affordable for everyone and this book seems doable on your own

There is no nuance in this book. Steven leaves no room for complexity, differing situations, or other reactions outside his framework, and the healing program he sets out is very much of the This Is The One And Only Way To Do It variety. That said, this book was originally published in the 1980s, and understandings of and treatment for mental health problems and childhood abuse recovery have come a long way since then. I think the lack of nuance and flexibility is just the book being a product of its time.

I still think this is an incredibly valuable book. I always appreciate books that are practical, and it doesn’t get more practical than two-thirds of the book being a step-by-step program with exercises and journal prompts. I would love to tell everyone to find a good therapist to help them through this process, but if you can’t afford that, I found this book for $2 at a used bookstore. I’d call this the next best thing to an actual therapist, and a whole lot cheaper.

Endnote: This book seems to be the only sane thing Steven Farmer has written. Everything else on his website is about spirit animals and earth magic and such. I have to assume he went into the magic nonsense after he wrote this book, because he does have genuine psychology credentials and this book is very sane, practical, and useful in the real world.

Review: Set Boundaries, Find Peace

Title: Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself

Author: Nedra Glover Tawwab

Genre: Self-Help/Relationships

Trigger Warnings: Mentions of physical abuse, sexual abuse, emotional abuse, and childhood neglect; some phrasing is not intended as victim blaming but could be interpreted as such

Back Cover:

End the struggle, speak up for what you need, and experience the freedom of being truly yourself.

Healthy boundaries. We all know we should have them–in order to achieve work/life balance, cope with toxic people, and enjoy rewarding relationships with partners, friends, and family. But what do healthy boundaries really mean–and how can we successfully express our needs, say no, and be assertive without offending others?

Licensed counselor, sought-after relationship expert, and one of the most influential therapists on Instagram Nedra Glover Tawwab demystifies this complex topic for today’s world. In a relatable and inclusive tone, Set Boundaries, Find Peace presents simple-yet-powerful ways to establish healthy boundaries in all aspects of life. Rooted in the latest research and best practices used in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), these techniques help us identify and express our needs clearly and without apology–and unravel a root problem behind codependency, power struggles, anxiety, depression, burnout, and more.

Review:

I’ve been looking for a good book on boundaries since I heard the term in college. Cloud and Townsend’s famous book was too aggressively religious for me, and Anne Katherine’s was … bad. I didn’t have high hopes for this one because I couldn’t even find anything on the internet that could define boundaries for me, let alone tell me how to set one.

Well, friends, this is the book I was looking for.

Reading this book is a wild experience, because it keeps having moments of, “let me recontextualize your entire life in one sentence. Moving on…” I paused countless times to just stop and think and wrote down no less than seven verbatim quotes while reading because this book insists on dropping explosions of wisdom like they’re obvious and continuing on while I’m still reeling. Reading this book redefined my childhood, explained how several relationship implosions in my past were at least partially caused by me not setting boundaries, and made setting boundaries make sense and feel doable.

I’m still not entirely sure I can give you a definition of what a boundary is, but I at least feel like I understand the idea in a vague, nebulous way. What this book did give me was an understanding of what happens when you don’t set boundaries, different areas where boundaries can and should be set (did you know you can have boundaries around your possessions? I didn’t!), the psychology around boundaries, common ways people react to you setting boundaries, suggestions of possible boundaries to set if you have no idea where to start, and most importantly, how to set and reinforce your boundaries with others.

This book is so inspiring and hopeful and explains so much about so many things. I’ve known a few boundaries I need to set, but this book makes it feel actually doable. It doesn’t promise that setting boundaries is going to be easy or comfortable but it does promise it’s both healthy and possible. It’s both an instruction manual for setting boundaries and a permission slip from a real actual therapist that you’re allowed to set boundaries and say no. I feel like so much understanding that I didn’t even know I was missing has just been granted to me. Read this book.