INTO THE FLOW

Branigan presents a memoir about grief, identity, and interconnectedness.

The author, a life coach, begins this self-help journey with the bombshell note of her mother’s cancer diagnosis, an intense event that made her question her Catholic faith. After her mother died, the author’s life became a “casket parade” as death stalked her family members and friends. “Everything I once considered safe and familiar felt flimsy, illusory, unreal,” Branigan recalls. After embarking on a quest to rediscover herself, she came to the sudden realization that “I wasn’t outside the universe looking in; I was the universe recognizing itself through me.” What resonated with her was the idea that the universe wasn’t random but instead was “intelligent, interconnected, vibrational.” Part Two chronicles the demise of the author’s marriage and the beginning of her coaching career, a time when she decided to quit her antidepressants and began to embrace her feelings. Part Three sees the author traveling to Peru to trip on ayahuasca. After she returns, just as she’s begun to embrace self-love, she meets and falls in love with a new man. The book concludes with a dream: “I was the free, creative flow of Life, dancing with itself.” In this bold book, Branigan writes with the immediacy and intimacy of a best friend. The tone is often bracingly irreverent: “In a few months, I would turn thirty-one. Pretty soon my eggs would need walkers with tennis balls to get around.” She’s unapologetically honest about the thorny parts of her life, from an ill-fitting marketing career to an unfulfilling marriage. She combines aha moments from her own life with wisdom from spiritual and self-help gurus like Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, and Brené Brown. The author does have a tendency toward the melodramatic, however: “For months, I felt so blissed out, I half expected strangers to ask why I was glowing. The truth of my realization buzzed through my cells.”

An unflinchingly honest memoir that favors breezy anecdote over serious self-help insight.