Review: Falling Back in Love with Being Human



 Y’all, I can’t even express how beautiful this book was. It absolutely absorbed me, and I was reading it on my phone which I usually really struggle with, so that’s a big thing. I’m not a huge memoir or essay reader and I don’t know exactly what I was expecting but it was just phenomenal. The essays are simultaneously cohesive and unique; they utilize different rhetorical devices, comparisons, and approaches but are all written with the same clear, distinctive voice and feel like they belong as part of a whole. Reading them felt like a meditation; it took me out of whatever setting I was in (waiting in a spinal clinic and watching a basketball game, to name two) into not another setting but a kind of contemplative state.

There were also a lot of themes that happened to really resonate with me, in particular her musings about anger, forgiveness, and justice. I don’t want to try to go too much into it here because honestly you’re just better off reading the book, but suffice it to say it absolutely captured all the contradictions and challenges and messiness of thinking through these things. She was candid and reflective in a way that I often don’t come across because so many people seem to think that showing uncertainty or measuredness is a sign of weakness or absence of commitment. These essays dismantle that belief in a graceful and compassionate, but still fierce, way. There are a few quotes I’d love to share but I’ll wait until it’s published, but basically I just want everyone I know to read this book.

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