2022 books: 8-10

[the_siobhan]

    

Running on Empty: Overcome Your Childhood Emotional Neglect by Jonice Webb PhD My therapist asked me to read this book so I did. It talks about the different forms of emotional neglect and how they manifest in adulthood. It's a good book about the subject if it's new to you or you're just figuring this shit out. I think I would have got a lot out of it if I had read it about 30 years earlier.

    

F*ck Feelings: One Shrink's Practical Advice for Managing All Life's Impossible Problems by Michael Bennett MD and Sarah Bennett Oh boy, do I have a lot of opinions about this book. The premise is pretty straightforward. You can't do anything about feelings, you can't do anything about other peoples' choices, life isn't fair, so you are better off concentrating on what you can actually do and being proud of what you can manage to accomplish in spite of the whatever suck gets thrown your way. So far so good. What offended me is that for somebody who is supposed to be a therapist, his opinions about people with actual mental illness is straight-up terrible. He describes BPD as the "crazy girlfriend" who is attractive because she likes to have wild sex but who ends up ruining your life. People who have autism, on the other hand, are always men who just need to be understood by the women in their lives. Wow. Fuck you, pal.

There's also some weird heteronormative bullshit. Like he responds to a letter-writer who complains that his family won't let up on the pressure for them and their partner to get married even though they are perfectly happy with their relationship by saying, "If you are not interested in a partnership you need to be honest about it, blah, blah, blah" and my immediate thought was, what? They are in a partnership, you absolute bell-end.

The daughter was brought in to make bad jokes and sprinkle in pop-culture references that are already starting to look dated. There is the repeated advice to figure out the correct logical approach to problem solving without any clear instructions and only the most basic scripts on how to do so. Really, you are better off going to read Captain Awkward, you'll get so much more out of it.

My favorite part of the book was that the person who dropped it in my library underlined certain sections and wrote peoples' names next to the descriptions and I found that absolutely hilarious.


    

Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything: When Celebrity Culture and Science Clash by Timothy Caulfield Another book that was left in my library. I grabbed it because I really hate celebrity marketing culture and it's weird-ass vagina candles. It's a strange book. It's almost really two books slapped together. The first half is about how all of the special diets, de-toxes, cleanses, and spa treatments are absolute bunk. The second half is about how hard it is to get into any part of the entertainment field as a paid professional. I feel like these two things are completely unrelated, so I guess that's evidence he didn't tie his thesis together very well. There were hints at the beginning that I was going to get some talk about why people give a shit about what Gwyneth Paltrow is shilling and why grow ass adults would even consider exposing their children to potential early death based on what comes out of Jenny McCarthy. That would have been much more interesting but alas, I was to be disappointed.

Comments

[houseof9cats]

That the first one is a national best-seller is sad. Nevertheless, putting it on my list.

[the_siobhan]

It's a good book. I think I tend to gravitate towards, "OK fine, but what do I do about it" and I'm already doing all the stuff they suggest and so that's why I didn't get as much out of it.