nyny2024

NonfictionMemoirBody, Mind & Spirit

On Thriving

Review by Carla Jean Whitley

“One of the many things that I love about plants is their will and determination to live by any means necessary,” Brandi Sellerz-Jackson writes. “What if we all dared not only to reach for the sun but to take up space while doing so?”

In On Thriving: Harnessing Joy Through Life’s Great Labors, Sellerz-Jackson draws inspiration from the plant world as she shares how she’s moved from existing to thriving. As a birth, postpartum and life doula, and as a blogger and founder of the Black-mom collective Moms of Color, she has coached others through their biggest challenges. On Thriving offers guidance for flourishing in relationships and with one’s self.

Sellerz-Jackson has faced devastating challenges of her own from the time she was a hyper-vigilant child whose instinct was to hide every sharp object in the house so her abusive father couldn’t do greater harm to her mother or himself. So when she references a plant’s journey, she’s not making light of traumatic human experiences. Instead, she’s drawing an analogy between the inner work she’s completed and the plant life that inspires her. On Thriving blends memoir and self-help, with Sellerz-Jackson excavating her own experiences and prompting others to examine the ways they’re holding back.

Most chapters conclude with questions or journal prompts meant to guide the reader back into conversation with themselves. Brief, poetic interludes provide a pause in the midst of often-heavy reflection. Throughout, and especially in the book’s final section, Sellerz-Jackson examines ways being othered has affected her identity and healing. As a Black woman and a mother, she has wrestled with the expectation of being a “goddess”—which she says, “robs us Black women of our humanity and plays into the strong Black woman archetype.”

Some may have been othered in different ways, and she encourages them to examine how that experience has affected the ways they move through the world. Sellerz-Jackson uses a conversational, direct tone and tremendous empathy to guide all readers to live as the best versions of themselves.

In Brandi Sellerz-Jackson’s On Thriving, she uses a conversational, direct tone and tremendous empathy to guide readers on how to move from existing to thriving.
NonfictionSelf-HelpMemoirBody, Mind & Spirit

Enchantment

Review by Sarah McCraw Crow

Katherine May’s essay collection Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age offers similar meditative pleasures as her previous collection, Wintering—though you don’t need to have read Wintering to enjoy Enchantment. “When I want to describe how I feel right now, the word I reach for the most is discombobulated,” she writes, going on to chart the losses, burnout and anxieties of the COVID-19 pandemic, and of this era. “Time has looped and gathered, and I sometimes worry that I could skip through decades like this, standing in my bathroom, until I am suddenly old.”

In the opening essay, May describes feeling like she had lost some fundamental part of being alive, some elemental human feeling—like she had become disconnected from meaning. Without this missing piece, “the world feels like tap water left overnight, flat and chemical, devoid of life,” she writes. She began to wonder if she could find a solution in enchantment, which she defines as “small wonder magnified through meaning, fascination caught in the web of fable and memory.” So she set out to find and record such moments, beginning with the places where she found beauty as a child, such as the farmland outside her grandparents’ English village.

Enchantment’s essays are arranged into four sections—Earth, Water, Fire and Air—detailing May’s investigations into each realm. For example, a visit to an ancient healing well goes in the Water section. “There are steps down to a pool of dark water about a foot deep, the heart-shaped petals of the [briar] rose floating on its surface,” she writes about this hidden well. As in the book’s other essays, May doesn’t gloss over her feelings of awkwardness and inadequacy. “It has the air of a place that has waited patiently for a long time for someone to come along and worship, and now it has me standing awkwardly before it, at a loss. It crackles with magic, but I have no template for how to behave around it, no tradition or culture that prepared me for this.”

May details the small disappointments and larger surprises she encountered on her journey, and her sentences, plain yet gorgeous, cast a spell. The essay “Hierophany” opens simply, “Just after lunchtime when I was a child, my grandmother would sit down to eat an orange, and peace would fall over the house.” Enchantment mixes nature writing and bits of history, theology and literature with memoir—scenes from May’s childhood, her failures at meditation, ordinary marital discontents—to form a lucid, restful collection. Though May’s search for enchantment seems perhaps better suited to the English landscape, with its fairy tale-like ancient sites and villages, than to our American suburban sprawl, Enchantment offers a lovely, meditative way to begin another tumultuous year.

Wintering author Katherine May returns with Enchantment, a lovely, meditative ode to finding connection in a disconnected age.
NonfictionSelf-HelpFamily & Relationships

The Origins of You

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Behaviors and beliefs are often perpetuated throughout families, when what we learned as children continues to show up in our families and relationships as adults. Sometimes these behaviors stem from childhood wounds that have led to negative repeating patterns.

In The Origins of You: How Breaking Family Patterns Can Liberate the Way We Live and Love, therapist and relationship expert Vienna Pharaon explains how to tap into the origin stories of these wounds in a productive way. Although naming the wounds we received during our upbringings can be a difficult and painful process, Pharaon writes that it is the “first step toward your healing.” The book is divided into four parts: our roots, our wounds and their origins, changing your relationship behaviors, and your reclamation. There’s an emphasis throughout on “origin healing work,” which is “an integration of family systems work and psychodynamic theory.”

By digging into her backlog of over 20,000 hours of work as a therapist and her Instagram community of over 600,000 followers, Pharaon puts feelings such as unworthiness and an inability to trust in context—along with these feelings’ subsequent destructive behaviors, such as being self-critical, not living authentically and avoiding honest communication. However, no client confidentiality is breached. Clients’ identities are disguised, and sometimes several clients are combined to emphasize a point. She also uses her own story as an example, referring back to her journey and growth time and again. These reality checks help the reader understand that they are not alone in their pain and show how addressing these origin wounds can be healing and transformative.

Thoughtful self-help exercises with suggestions on how to best read, process and digest this information are woven throughout The Origins of You, and Pharaon feels like a cheerleader and confidant as she offers honest, straightforward advice. “What if . . . digging into your origin story,” she asks, “could yield the relief and the exact answers you’ve been looking for all along?”

Therapist Vienna Pharaon is a cheerleader and confidant throughout The Origins of You, helping readers break negative family patterns and find healing.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul

Review by Kelly Blewett

Many of us long to help the world bend toward justice, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. put it. However, our culture’s image of the social justice warrior—fiery, loud, unapologetically confrontational—limits who can participate and how it should be done. Dorcas Cheng-Tozun’s essential new book, Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul: How to Change the World in Quiet Ways, is written specifically for highly sensitive people (HSPs) with a passion for social reform. It encourages and equips those who don’t fit the typical social justice warrior profile to work toward the changes they want to see in the world while still taking care of themselves, particularly in the current climate of public disagreement, trolling and outright hostility. With gentleness and vulnerability, Cheng-Tozun persuades readers that the world needs HSPs’ strengths now more than ever. 

Social Justice for the Sensitive Soul first explores what it means to be highly sensitive, both in terms of strengths and limitations. Cheng-Tozun writes that HSPs are defined by four traits: “depth of processing, quicker to overstimulation, emotional reactivity, and sensing the subtle.” Next, she considers key questions that can help HSPs critically analyze sustainable options for participating in social justice causes. The third section offers an abundant and exciting set of pathways for politically active HSPs, organized by the different roles they could play according to their strengths and visions for the future—such as connectors, creatives, record keepers, builders and so on. Throughout these sections, Cheng-Tozun draws on survey data from over 200 HSPs, shares her own struggles with debilitating burnout and offers insights from social movements of the past.

Each section builds on what came before, and the loving touches throughout—the heartfelt personal examples, the memorable illustrations from history, the strong and affirming overall vision—make it truly unforgettable. Like a deep breath of fresh air in the morning, this is a book that can draw readers back to center and give them new ideas to move forward. Be sure to inscribe your name in your copy; you will want to share this hopeful, practical, richly evidenced, deeply personal and exceptionally well-organized book with your friends.

Dorcas Cheng-Tozun’s hopeful, practical book will equip highly sensitive people to work toward justice and social reform while still taking care of themselves.
NonfictionSelf-HelpLifestylesFamily & Relationships

How to Say Goodbye

Review by Susannah Felts

Death is a process—a challenge for both the dying and their loved ones, and a journey of wide-ranging emotional shifts, yet rarely are we encouraged to fully experience it as such. The illustrated approach of Wendy MacNaughton’s How to Say Goodbye is a quietly powerful gesture in the right direction. As an artist-in-residence at a San Francisco hospice, McNaughton closely observed the dying and their caregivers, absorbing wisdom and appreciating small moments—a plate of fruit, flowers, hands held. “Drawing is a way we can look closely at something we might otherwise be afraid to look at,” she reflects. Her gentle pictures are followed by a deep well of resources for the dying and those who love and care for them. In his foreword, palliative care physician BJ Miller, MD, sets the tone: “​​Presence, after all, is not an intellectual exercise. It’s a corporeal surrender. Attuning, if you like. What does your body tell you about what the body before you is doing? What does your soul know about the one playing at the edge of existence right in front of you? Can you stop trying to figure it out and just be it?”

Wendy MacNaughton’s gentle drawings are followed by a deep well of resources for the dying and those who love and care for them.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Think Faster, Talk Smarter

Review by Becky Libourel Diamond

Red face. Sweaty palms. Shaky voice. We’ve all likely experienced at least one of these symptoms when having to give a spur-of-the-moment answer or speech. Luckily, Matt Abrahams (Stanford lecturer, coach and host of the popular “Think Fast, Talk Smart The Podcast”), has a six-step method to help us become “more comfortable and confident in the moment” regardless of “how affable, sociable, and facile with words we perceive ourselves to be.” In Think Faster, Talk Smarter: How to Speak Successfully When You’re Put on the Spot, he provides suggestions, exercises and techniques on how to become a better speaker.

The first part of the book covers the six initial steps and the second part explains how to talk smarter in specific situations. Throughout, there are prompts to Try It (attempt specific techniques), Drill It (practice key techniques in more depth) and Use It (integrate these techniques into our daily lives). Along the way, Abrahams gives many examples of spontaneous real-life scenarios, such as when a moderator asks to add 15 minutes of informal question and answer after a formal presentation. He also offers tangible advice and coping tools such as creating an Anxiety Management Plan (AMP) and suggestions on how and when to use it. Tips and tricks for a variety of situations such as “daring to be dull” by “giving ourselves permission to do what needs to be done” are also highlighted. And a user-friendly chart summarizing various techniques to help manage impromptu speaking anxiety makes these methods easy to incorporate into one’s life.

Commentary from authorities such as researchers, psychologists, professors and improvisation experts gives perspective and credence to Abrahams’ methodology. And he isn’t afraid to relay his own experiences and problem-solving techniques, highlighting the benefits of learning from mistakes or what he calls “missed takes,” which can serve to focus efforts and empower us. Think Faster, Talk Smarter provides affirmation that there is no right or wrong way to communicate, instead focusing on the importance of practice and preparation, stressing that “all of us can become strong speakers in the moment if we put in the time.”

Professor and “Think Fast, Talk Smart” podcast host Matt Abrahams provides suggestions, exercises and techniques on how to become a better speaker.

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