In this memoir/advice guide, a psychotherapist shares the story of her contentious divorce as well as tips for obtaining a divorce without an attorney and other “self-care” strategies.
Goodwin admits that she was gobsmacked by her second marriage: “I simply did not see this nastiness coming, nor did anything in my life before or since prepare me for the days in court which waited me.” She ended up handling her divorce from Eli, himself a corporate lawyer, largely without a lawyer since she had learned to distrust the entire profession. “The myth of needing to retain a lawyer is a terrible one,” she notes. “Lawyers are taught to drum up conflict.” In a three-part narrative, Goodwin details her “intense coupling” with Eli, which started when she was co-facilitator of a spirituality workshop that he attended. They joined forces, including living with their children from past marriages, but the relationship unraveled as Eli “psychologically deteriorated.” He ended up leaving his job, filing for disability, then filing for divorce, misrepresenting his previous divorce decree to claim financial hardship and leave Goodwin with nothing. In the second part of her book, Goodwin walks readers through the various legal forms and protocols she dealt with during her divorce. The final section focuses on exercise, nutrition, meditation and other self-care activities that she believes are critical in life overall and particularly in managing the stress of divorce. This first-person account is oddly entertaining, with Goodwin’s wry recounting of bizarre behavior—such as Eli waking the family up at 4:30 to find out who left the top off the ketchup bottle—at times reminiscent of Augusten Burroughs’s Running with Scissors. Overall, however, the narrative is rather murky and muddled, with Goodwin’s own back story and the resolution of her case remaining rather hazy. Still, Goodwin admirably spotlights the land mines of divorce, and if nothing else, she points those in similar straits to self-help advice available elsewhere.
Offbeat, rambling testimony that provides some practical pointers and serves as a cautionary tale for those dealing with divorce.
Pub Date: March 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1452591124
Page Count: 320
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.
A lightweight collection of self-help snippets from the bestselling author.
What makes a quote a quote? Does it have to be quoted by someone other than the original author? Apparently not, if we take Strayed’s collection of truisms as an example. The well-known memoirist (Wild), novelist (Torch), and radio-show host (“Dear Sugar”) pulls lines from her previous pages and delivers them one at a time in this small, gift-sized book. No excerpt exceeds one page in length, and some are only one line long. Strayed doesn’t reference the books she’s drawing from, so the quotes stand without context and are strung together without apparent attention to structure or narrative flow. Thus, we move back and forth from first-person tales from the Pacific Crest Trail to conversational tidbits to meditations on grief. Some are astoundingly simple, such as Strayed’s declaration that “Love is the feeling we have for those we care deeply about and hold in high regard.” Others call on the author’s unique observations—people who regret what they haven’t done, she writes, end up “mingy, addled, shrink-wrapped versions” of themselves—and offer a reward for wading through obvious advice like “Trust your gut.” Other quotes sound familiar—not necessarily because you’ve read Strayed’s other work, but likely due to the influence of other authors on her writing. When she writes about blooming into your own authenticity, for instance, one is immediately reminded of Anaïs Nin: "And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Strayed’s true blossoming happens in her longer works; while this collection might brighten someone’s day—and is sure to sell plenty of copies during the holidays—it’s no substitute for the real thing.
These platitudes need perspective; better to buy the books they came from.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-101-946909
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2015
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
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