Lane Moore

I feel as though this is a very specific book for a very specific audience, and I unfortunately don’t think I’m in that group. I truly feel decades older than the author, although I don’t actually know how old she is which is very interesting considering what you can usually find online.

But she never seems to consider the idea of just one or two close friends rather than a slew of them, and that’s completely antithetical to how I work. She’s definitely been influenced by tv shows that I’ve never seen, so that didn’t help me much either. Even though she has a lot of friends it seems, I do find it odd that apparently they’re all one offs and not necessarily friends together in any small groups; she never addressed that aspect that I can remember either.

If nothing else this did make me reminisce about my own friendships over the years and how to try to revive some in order to bring back amazing people into my life as that’s not really addressed much either (she talks about maintenance but not how to reach out so long after the fact—again making me feel ancient in that she doesn’t seem to have had many years to contemplate this all).… (more)

Beautifully written and sitting somewhere between memoir and self-help, which may turn some people off, but not to fear: there's no checklists or journaling exercises here, just some heartfelt messages from an author who wants her readers to love themselves.

This is what it's like to fumble your way through adulthood when you spent your childhood with dysfunctional, broken people who hurt you and blamed you for making them hurt you. Even when everything looks like you've got it all together and you can't help but think that if you were really that special, or even basically acceptable, your own parents would have liked you--right?--so you must just have fooled everyone.

In one section she talks about the self-help industry's obsession with telling traumatized people to stop blaming their abusive parents for abusing them; it was spot on and reminded me of my own review of one such book. The parts about seeking out unsafe partners and situations because they were familiar? Yep. The parts about having a broken fear response because you've already been through terrible things that somehow didn't kill you? Yep. The parts about not knowing how to remove yourself from an unsafe situation because honestly that's never been an option before and you hadn't even considered it? Yep.

It's hard to tell for me, having skimmed a bunch of the reviews, how many readers and reviewers are coming from a similar background. Maybe a few? Normally I focus on the negative reviews because that's how I learn quickly about whether or not I'll like something: for example, if there's a lot of 1 or 2 star reviews complaining that the book is obviously part of a SJW plot to destroy natural, god-given sex or race hierarchies, I know I'm going to love that book. You can learn a lot about a story by noting what people consistently complain about in it.

Here what I mostly see in the negative reviews, is a lot of people justifying Lane's fears about being honest about the burdens of this kind of childhood abuse, by being awful and derogatory not about the book, but about the author. It's the stigma and shame in action that keep most people from sharing these stories in action. It's really sad.… (more)