Lovely inspiration for creatives—and indeed anyone seeking to make sense out of life.
The noted British actor, writer, and producer offers a searching, encouraging guide to finding one’s voice and vision.
At the 2021 Emmy Awards, where she was honored for I May Destroy You, Coel memorably said, “Write the tale that scares you, that makes you feel uncertain, that isn’t comfortable. I dare you.” It wasn’t her first such exhortation. This short book encapsulates her 2018 MacTaggart Lecture before an industry audience at the Edinburgh TV Festival. The author places her success in British TV against a background of “rape, malpractice and poverty” along with a constant undercurrent of racism and sexism. Another theme is the necessity of shaping one’s own life through hard effort. Growing up in a poor immigrant household in the literal shadow of a leading London bank, she enrolled in a neighborhood theater program for low-income children—“for free. Free was cheaper than childcare, and at eight years old I was part of Bridewell Youth Theatre. The only Black person.” She took the work seriously, attending drama school and, though suffering the usual disappointments (taking the lead in Lysistrata, for instance, but in the London equivalent of an off-off Broadway theater that no agent would bother visiting), she blossomed. Finally offered a TV show, Coel met no end of small insults, but she overcame each obstacle. She accepted being one of the industry’s historically excluded “misfits” (another theme). Lately, she writes, “channels, production companies and online streaming services have found themselves scrabbling for misfits…aware they might be very profitable.” The author counsels all storytellers and creatives to be bravely transparent about their worst experiences and bitterest realities, ground from which art can grow, and to remember a sage bit of advice she once read: “There are as many perspectives as there are people.”
Lovely inspiration for creatives—and indeed anyone seeking to make sense out of life.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-250-84344-9
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.
An experimental, illustrated essay collection that questions neurotypical definitions of what is normal.
From a young age, writer and comedian Myers has been different. In addition to coping with obsessive compulsive disorder and panic attacks, she struggled to read basic social cues. During a round of seven minutes in heaven—a game in which two players spend seven minutes in a closet and are expected to kiss—Myers misread the romantic advances of her best friend and longtime crush, Marley. In Paris, she accidentally invited a sex worker to join her friends for “board games and beer,” thinking he was simply a random stranger who happened to be hitting on her. In community college, a stranger’s request for a pen spiraled her into a panic attack but resulted in a tentative friendship. When the author moved to Australia, she began taking notes on her colleagues in an effort to know them better. As the author says to her co-worker, Tabitha, “there are unspoken social contracts within a workplace that—by some miracle—everyone else already understands, and I don’t….When things Go Without Saying, they Never Get Said, and sometimes people need you to Say Those Things So They Understand What The Hell Is Going On.” At its best, Myers’ prose is vulnerable and humorous, capturing characterization in small but consequential life moments, and her illustrations beautifully complement the text. Unfortunately, the author’s tendency toward unnecessary capitalization and experimental forms is often unsuccessful, breaking the book’s otherwise steady rhythm.
A frank and funny but uneven essay collection about neurodiversity.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9780063381308
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2025
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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