A Certain Slant of Light

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

I’ve been on a bit of a graphic novel kick recently, which I continued with Besties: Working It Out, cowritten by Kayla Miller & Jeffrey Canino and illustrated by Kristina Luu. I’ve complained about some of Miller’s choices in her past books (although it hasn’t stopped me from reading each new book as it comes out!), so I was surprised that I just straight up liked this one. Possibly bouncing ideas off a cowriter and illustrator softened some of the weirder edges off Miller’s ideas about How Friendships Work.

The best friends in this are Beth and Chanda, two friends who get a dogsitting job so Beth can buy her mother a birthday present and Chanda can convince her parents that she’s responsible enough to get a pet cat. Naturally, things don’t go quite smoothly… I love this snapshot of a pre-teen friendship: they have so much fun together, and their friendship is strong enough to mend after they get into a big fight.

I also finished my Alex Beam journey with his first book, Gracefully Insane: Life and Death in America’s Premier Mental Hospital, which chock full of interesting anecdotes about the history of psychiatry. It focuses particularly on anything related to the McLean Hospital in Massachusetts (the last resort of Boston Brahmins in mental distress), although Beam ranges more widely at times, as in telling the tale of Freud’s disciple Dr. Horace Frink, who also became Freud’s patient, which resulted in a spectacularly botched psychoanalysis.

Frink had fallen in love with one of his own patients, a wealthy married woman named Angie Bijur. Frink himself was also married, but Freud nonetheless encouraged the pair to leave their respective spouses, marry each other, and then give a large amount of money to Freud, as he explains in this arrestingly bizarre letter to Frink (Freud, you understand, had diagnosed Frink with unconscious homosexuality): “Your complaint that you cannot grasp your homosexuality implies that you are not yet aware of your phantasy of making me a rich man. If matters turn out all right [that is, if Frink and Mrs. Bijur marry] let us change the imaginary gift into a real contribution to the psychoanalytic fund.”

What I’m Reading Now

After MUCH TRAVAIL I figured out how to play audiobooks on Overdrive through my iPod, so now I’m listening to Mrs. Pollifax and the Lion Killer, which the library CRUELLY refused to buy as a regular ebook. Mrs. Pollifax’s friend Kedi has just been ATTACKED IN THE PALACE GARDEN!

I’ve also begun Sylvia Townshend Warner’s The Corner That Held Them, a book about nuns in the Middle Ages. The Black Death has just passed and now the remaining peasants want better wages for their labor! THE AUDACITY.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been organizing my book tag and stumbled on a recommendation for another nun book, Gail Godwin’s Unfinished Desires. Has anyone read this? How did you feel about it?

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

Aiden halted by the first cute boy he saw. “What are you doing tonight?”

The boy seemed staggered. Harvard didn’t blame him. Aiden sounded rather as though he was demanding the boy’s money or his life.

“Being… heterosexual?” the boy answered at last.

Aiden stood there being gorgeous at him. A stunned and dazzled expression grew on the boy’s face, as though he’d accidentally looked directly into the sun or encountered a pinup model.

“Or maybe…not?” said the boy, a long pause between the words.

Sarah Rees Brennan’s Fence: Striking Distance is an absolute delight that frequently had me laughing and/or shrieking out loud. I went into this book wanting to smack Aiden and by the end of the book… well, okay, I still wanted to smack Aiden, but in a kind and loving way.

I loved Brennan’s characterization of Aiden and Harvard, and I thought Nicholas was pretty good (LOVED the way that his attention just slides of Aiden whenever Aiden talks; I always enjoy a character who is just not charmed by the Most Charming character), but I had some doubts about her characterization of Seiji. She presents him as just Not Getting social cues, whereas in the graphic novels I much more had the impression that he could have gotten social cues if he gave a damn, which he doesn’t.

I also loved Nancy Farmer’s A Girl Named Disaster, although I felt it very slightly fell off at the end, which seems to be almost unavoidable in the wilderness adventure genre; inevitably the character must return to civilization and I always feel like, “But do they HAVE to?” And, well, Nhamo was on the verge of starvation, so clearly she did.

The wilderness adventure parts are great, though, and they make up the bulk of the book. And it’s by no means a bad ending! Just not as exciting as Nhamo in the wilderness talking to a maybe-ghost (or maybe-dream) about how to repair her boat.

What I’m Reading Now

asakiyume! I bet Nancy Farmer’s The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm was the book you were thinking of last week with the walled village where people dress in traditional style, because that is ABSOLUTELY something that happens in this book! Outside is a futuristic city with flying buses and an old dump that has become a plastic mine; within the walls, a traditional village where people tell riddles to pass the time.

I’ve also been galloping through Bessel van der Kolk’s The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, you know, for a little light reading (but also research for the amount of trauma that I keep dumping on the heads of the poor benighted characters in my books, who really deserved better from life).

What I Plan to Read Next

I would like to read Fence: Disarmed, but ALAS, the library doesn’t have it yet, so I will have to make do with Sarah Rees Brennan’s earlier novel In Other Lands for now. I’ve meant to read it for ages anyway.

I’m about a third of the way through Marilyn Yalom’s The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship, and I’m finding it really frustrating. Possibly I should have expected it, because I first heard about this book in Jennifer Mroz’s Girl Talk: What Science Can Tell Us about Female Friendship, which I also found frustrating… But then that book is also where I first heard of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, which I loved, so maybe there was no way I could have known.

One of the aspects I found most frustrating in Girl Talk was the author’s capsule history of female friendship, which struck me as facile. For instance, she starts off with the assertion that the ancient Greeks and Romans thought women couldn’t be friends, without having any sources that could shed any light on the lived experience of ancient Greek and Roman women. It’s all quotes from Cicero and Seneca and Aristotle.

Well, it turns out that Mroz lifted this analysis (such as it is) wholesale from The Social Sex, which is ten times longer than Mroz’s chapter but nonetheless never manages to dig any deeper. Mostly Yalom uses the extra length to introduce more friendship pairs from many different times and places, which I do appreciate, but only in the sense that I would like to read more about many of these people in some other book, written by an author with a more nuanced analytical toolkit.

In particular, I feel that an author who has some familiarity with queer theory would be helpful. Yalom keeps quoting things like Katherine Philips’ seventeenth-century love poems to other women and being like “THIS IS TOTALLY PLATONIC, YOU GUYS,” and I feel that there are only so many times you get to play the TOTALLY PLATONIC card before you need to either rethink your choice of sources - does this love poem fit in a book about friendship? Does it really? - or your definition of friendship. Maybe friendship sometimes has an erotic element, particularly the kind of really intense friendship that Yalom chooses to highlight.

Upon reflection, it may not be worthwhile to finish this book. Possibly I should check the endnotes to see if Yalom cites any sources that look interesting, and read those instead.

Jennifer Mroz’s Girl Talk: What Science Can Tell Us about Female Friendship is a useful compendium of interesting books about female friendship. I jumped right into Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney’s A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf, about which I shall write a review anon, and I’ve added Marilyn Yalom’s The Social Sex: A History of Female Friendship to my reading list.

Otherwise, though, Girl Talk is rather a wash. She opens with a facile chapter about the history of female friendship, which kicks off with the assertion that the ancient Greeks and Romans thought women couldn’t be friends, when in fact we only know that Greek and Roman men thought women couldn’t be friends. We have very little evidence what women thought about the matter.

And the absence of evidence shouldn’t be assumed to imply agreement. In societies where we have ample sources from both men and women (like, say, our own; or nineteenth-century England and America) there’s often a distinct difference in what men say about women and women say about themselves. Just because the men thought “women can’t” doesn’t mean women agreed. Sappho would be a far better starting place to understanding the lived experience of woman in classical antiquity than Seneca.

But okay. Mroz is a science writer; history may not be her forte. Maybe it’ll get better once she gets to the science.

But no. Mroz seems puzzled about what possible evolutionary advantage female friendship could have, and she remains puzzled even after she quotes evidence that shows that animals (including humans) with wider social networks tend to live longer and have more surviving offspring.

That’s… that’s the definition of an evolutionary advantage. I don’t know what else she’s looking for.

Or actually I do: she wants some kind of scientific, evolutionary explanation for the patterns she’s noticed in her own friendships, like the fact that female friends feel compelled to be supportive of their friends even when they know their friends are in the wrong, and to sweep conflict under the rug, which can lead to friendship break-ups as devastating as divorces.

But evolution isn’t going to answer these questions, because this is a cultural issue, not an evolutionary one, as becomes clear in Mroz’s chapter about female friendship in other countries. In Korea, for instance, friends are not expected to be supportive no matter what, but to bluntly confront each other with their flaws if necessary. If your friend loses her job, and you know that she’s been late every day and she spends most of her time in the office playing Candy Crush, a white American might feel compelled to say, “How could they fire you! You’re so great!” (aware all the while that this is a base lie, but that telling the truth may destroy the friendship), whereas a good Korean friend would say, “They fired you because you were a horrible employee. Play less Candy Crush next time.”

Mroz writes an entire chapter about this sort of thing - and then pops right back into “so how can we use evolution to explain (white, probably middle- or upper-class?) women’s friendships in America (or maybe the Anglophone countries more generally?” And the answer, as Mroz just demonstrated, is that you can’t! Because these are cultural patterns, not genetic ones! Did she write that entire chapter about the differences in friendships in different cultures without ever realizing that it meant most of her generalizations about women and the nature of female friendships are bunk?

I did not expect Johann Hari’s Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs to blow my tiny mind. I knew that the war on drugs grew out of a race panic in the early twentieth century. (“Black men/Mexican men/Chinese men seducing white women with cocaine/cannabis/opium! THIS SCOURGE MUST BE STOPPED.”) I’ve read about many of the experiments Hari cites, like Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park. I was already basically in accord with Hari’s view that the war on drugs has been a disaster.

But nonetheless the book did blow my tiny mind, because Hari not only shows that the war on drugs has only led to an increase in crime and increased power for organized crime without making any perceptible dent in the number of addicts - he also shows that almost everything that I thought I knew about drugs & addiction were wrong.

Case in point: Only 10% of drug users become addicts. This holds true even for drugs like crack cocaine or heroin, even though the general perception with these drugs that “if you try these once you’re probably going to die an addict.” (This is more or less the impression I got in health class.)

In fact it turns out that addiction itself often dies out naturally, even in the absence of any heavy-duty treatment: people drink alcohol or smoke pot or do heroin because the pain and stress in their life is unmanageable, and when they’re in a manageable situation again they either stop entirely or become recreational users again. (Hari cites heroin use statistics among US soldiers in Vietnam: people were terrified that hordes of hopelessly addicted soldiers would come back to the States and wreak havoc, but in fact 95% of the soldiers stopped once they got home. They no longer needed it.)

The reason for this discrepancy is that the War on Drugs narrative about drugs is all about the chemicals in drugs. It promotes the idea that addiction is a result of chemicals: drugs have chemical hooks that hijack your brain and force you to need more drugs forever.

But, Hari explains, although that chemical effect is real, it’s actually not the main factor that drives addiction. “With the most powerful and deadly drug in our culture [nicotine], the actual chemicals account for only 17.7 percent of the compulsion to use.” (183)

Side note. One of the bitter ironies of the drug war is that the two deadliest drugs - alcohol and tobacco - aren’t illegal. (They tried it briefly with alcohol during Prohibition, but that had such deleterious effects on white communities that - imagine - the government actually called that one off.)

Other side note, I suspect that 17.7% figure is a bit shakier than some of Hari’s other evidence, but fortunately he has other evidence to muster to support his argument that environment rather than the innate addictiveness of the chemicals is the main driving factor in addiction. This is where Bruce Alexander’s Rat Park experiments come into play.

Capsule summary: if you put rats in tiny bare cages with no other stimulus (which is basically hell on earth for a social animal like a rat - or a human), nine out of ten will use cocaine till they die. If you put rats in a giant cage with lots of toys and other rats to play with, they will use much less cocaine, and none of them will use it till they die.

Also, it turns out that if you take cocaine-addicted rats out of their tiny bare cages and put them in Rat Park, they will make friends with the other rats and soon break out of their addiction.

What the drug war does, instead, is make it harder for addicts to form meaningful connections with other human beings. It’s hard to get a job or find housing with a drug conviction.

Or, as Hari puts it, “the core of addiction doesn’t lie in what you swallow or inject - it’s in the pain you feel in your head. Yet we have built a system that thinks we will stop addicts by increasing their pain.” (166)

Addicts become addicts because the drugs are the only things that can stop their pain - they’ve bonded with drugs rather than with other human beings, often because their rotten childhood gave them no opportunity to form healthy human bonds.

“Professor Peter Cohen...writes that we should stop using the word ‘addiction’ altogether and shift to a new word: ‘bonding.’ Human beings need to bond. It is one of our most primal urges. So if we can’t bond with other people, we will find a behavior to bond with, whether it’s watching pornography or smoking crack or gambling.” (175)

Also, as Hari outlines later, addicts often find people to bond with through their addictions. Gamblers bond with fellow gamblers, alcoholics bond with the bartender, heroin addicts bond with other heroin addicts, etc. Humans need bonds so much that we will latch onto bonds that will kill us rather than go totally without.

(It occurs to me - this is just me spitballing, not something Hari talks about - that we may have to rethink Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If people are willing to put emotional bonding above safety and even basic physiological needs like food and shelter, we may need to move it down closer to the bottom of the pyramid. Do psychologists actually use Maslow’s hierarchy of needs anymore anyway? It still has currency in pop psychology, at least.)

This doesn’t even close to summarize Hari’s whole book. He also talks a lot about the destruction the drug war has wrought in countries on major drug supply lines, where drug money allows gangs to become more powerful than the cash-strapped local government. He points out that the reason the drug war spread worldwide is because the US basically strong-armed everyone else into it.

But this has already gotten quite long. So the long and the short of it is that our current drug laws are pretty much the opposite of what you would design if you wanted to design a system that would actually limit the harm of addiction. In countries like Portugal, where drugs have been decriminalized, addiction goes down, because it’s easier for addicts to get help and stop being addicts.

And even the addicts who aren’t ready to quit yet become significantly more functional members of society once they no longer have to hustle to pay astronomical prices to pay criminals for drugs (which are often adulterated - and it’s the adulteration that causes a lot of the side effects we associate with drugs). They get a prescription for their drug from doctors, and they get jobs, start families, settle down, and then often stop using simply because there’s so much else going on in their lives that they no longer really need the drug.

It’s a lot cheaper to administer than a drug war, too. In fact, legalized drugs can be taxed, so they become a net revenue stream rather than a revenue drain. And then you’ve got all sorts of money to spend on other things, like child abuse prevention programs that might make a dent in addiction before the drug-using part even begins.

Win-win all around, really. Maybe someday we’ll put this into practice.

I must confess, I got Frances Little’s 1906 bestseller The Lady of the Decoration because I suspected it would be a racist trainwreck - it’s a novel by an American author! set in Japan! written in 1906! - and I could get a delightfully cutting review out of it.

Rarely have I been so pleased to have my expectations dashed. It isn’t perfect (and the moments of racism that really rocked me back were all against black people, and not the Japanese, which is quite a feat given that there aren’t any black characters in the novel) but neither is it a trainwreck, and in fact I liked it a lot. The descriptions of the Japanese landscape are gorgeous, and reminded me in a slantwise way of Natsume’s Book of Friends, which also has long loving landscape shots. And both stories have the same sense of the protagonist finding at last some precariously balanced happiness, after long difficult years.

The narrator in this case - I’m not sure she ever does get a name! This only just struck me. The novel is told as a one-sided stream of letters home, so it feels perfectly natural that her name never comes up. She’s a young widow, who lost an unlamented husband who made her life a misery - we get no details (presumably her correspondent knows all about it already), but he left her in a state of nervous exhaustion, and she went to Japan to teach at a missionary kindergarten (despite having no missionary leanings and little religious feeling) on the hope that a change of air and scenery combined with useful work might help her put herself back together.

And it does help, although it is also a struggle, right up to the end of the book. “The whole truth is I’m worsted! The fight has been too much. Days, weeks, months of homesickness have piled up on top of me until all my courage and my control, all my will seem paralysed. Night after night I lie awake and stare into the dark, and staring back at me is the one word ‘alone.’”

Then she heads out to mail the letter in a raging storm, after which she walks recklessly onto the sea wall, climbs the stone lantern, and lets the rain beat on her face and the thunder roar above her and the waves rush against the sea wall until the storm dies away, and the sun rises above the sea, and through some sort of meteorological transference, feels her own spirits rise within her as well.

I am continually astounded by how often characters in nineteenth & early twentieth century novels fall prey to their nerves - it might of course be selection bias, but then I usually select these books on the basis of “I know nothing about this book but it’s on Kindle for free!” which I think would rather mitigate against that. In any case it’s super useful: I’m working again on the book set after the Civil War, where the heroine has suffered what we would call depression (and they might also call it depression, but they would also call it “nerves”), and I definitely highlighted some stuff in here for reference.

This makes it sound super grim, which it is not. The “blue devils” (as the heroine calls these attacks of depression) are not always after her, and there are plenty of fun times, too: visits to Nagasaki, Kyoto, Vladivostok (which she does not like; this book was published fresh on the end of the Russo-Japanese War and America was solidly on Japan’s side). Even Shanghai! And she’s very funny, sometimes even when she’s in the depths of despair: she reminded me of a more worldly version of Judy from Daddy-Long-Legs in her gleeful but good-hearted irreverence. Witness this exchange she reports between a tract-bearing missionary and a seasick passenger:

“Brother, are you a Christian?”

“No, no,” he muttered impatiently. “I’m a Norwegian.

Now what that man needed was a cocktail, but it was not for me to suggest it.

If you want to despair about something, then Robert A. Forde’s Bad (Forensic) Psychology: How Psychology Left Science Behind is definitely worth a look. This book is an indictment not just of psychology as practiced in the British prison system, but of every comforting lie you ever believed about the predictive abilities of experts (all experts, though Forde is talking specifically about psychologists for most of the book): “it turns out that professionals of all levels of training and experience predict about as well as lay people,” Forde informs us. “There is abundant and increasing evidence that psychologists’ judgments are subject to exactly the same weaknesses as everyone else’s.” His book is a methodical examination of just how weak human judgment often is.

Just look at the clusterfuck that passes for treatment in prisons. One-size-fits-all treatment plans got rolled out on a nationwide scale with little or no prior testing for efficacy, only for it to turn out - when these programs are tested with adequate sample sizes - that these treatments either have no effect on recidivism, or actually make it worse.

And this is what passes for mental health care in prisons. There’s very little attempt to get actual mental healthcare to prisoners with real mental health problems (substance abuse is the big one; Forde also notes that “violence rates amongst those suffering from depression are appreciably higher than in the general population,” although “the vast majority of people with mental disorders do not commit crimes of violence, or any other kind.”). The one-size-fits-all programs are genuinely seen as universally applicable and therefore are supposed to fix the problems underlying substance abuse, which is impulse control, apparently.

(I’m not sure if the proponents of this theory also believe that better impulse control will cure depression, or if depression just doesn’t fit into their understanding of How Crime Works and so they ignore it.)

And then there’s the tragicomedy of the parole board hearing. Did you know that parole boards are more likely to grant parole after lunch than right before? There are studies to this effect. The considered opinion of the parole board is affected just as much by whether the members splurged on a sandwich platter from the deli down the street as by anything in the case files.

In fact, human judgment in general just seems to mess up parole decisions. Statistics have a 70% success rate at predicting recidivism among released criminals. In an attempt to make this prediction more accurate, parole boards often ask prison psychologists for their clinical judgment, which seems reasonable enough - except that “Clinical judgment has long been known to predict reconviction at approximately the chance level, like tossing a coin.”

The question of course arises - if treatment programs (in their current form) and parole hearings are useless, why do they continue? It’s partly inertia - these things have all been set into motion and it’s hard to stop them. In the case of treatment programs, there’s also a profit motive: the people who created the popular treatment programs are making bank, and the people who run them have a vested interest in seeing that they continue to prosper. (This is, I should add, not evidence of a sinister conspiracy, but evidence of the fact that humans are consistently blind to how much our material interests influence our judgment.)

And there’s just the plain fact that we want to do something about crime. Having a parole board seems more proactive than making parole decisions by consulting an actuarial chart of recidivism risks. Treatment programs seem more humane than simply “waiting for prisoners to get older and less impulsive,” as a judge put it to Forde when discussing Forde’s views on parole hearings - even though that’s pretty much what prisons are: holding pens in which people get older and less impulsive until they have probably aged out of their desire to batten on the general public.

Although only probably. We will never be able to predict recidivism rates with 100% accuracy. In fact, 70% seems about as high as it will go, barring some great new statistical discovery. We will have to let go of our hope for a controllable world and accept our own comparative powerlessness.

What I’ve Finished Reading

William B. Irvine’s A Slap in the Face: Why Insults Hurt - And Why They Shouldn’t, which is about the history and social function of insults. It includes a chapter about friendly teasing & ambiguous insults, which I found especially interesting, and also a fair amount of space on how to respond to insults - one of the suggestions was to say “Thanks,” which I think is beautiful in its simplicity and ability to throw the insulter off their game. (Probably not for backhanded compliments, but otherwise.)

He also talks about the self-esteem movement a bit, the main point being that the movement saw the correlation between high self-esteem and achievement and got the causation backwards - probably, excuse my grumpiness, because cooing “You’re so special!” at everyone is so much easier than taking the time and effort to foster genuine achievement.

Irvine also makes the point - which ought to be obvious, but lots of commentators seem to miss it - that if the Millennial generation seems narcissistic, it’s because that’s the inevitable outcome of inflicting “You’re Thumbody special!” programs on a generation. You can’t din that in a generation’s ears for years and then act shocked, shocked! when they take narcissism tests and answer “Yes” to the question “Are you special?”

Unread Book Club progress: I finished Virginia Sorenson’s Miracles on Maple Hill, which has lots of delightful detail about tapping maples, wildflowers, the countryside, etc. It doesn’t go very in-depth about Marly’s father’s PTSD, but after all it’s a book about Marly, not her father, and I did think the author did a nice job showing how her father’s less-than-joyous return from a prisoner of war camp has affected Marly while balancing that with the more light-hearted “And then we met the resident mountain hermit!” bits.

What I’m Reading Now

Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I must confess I had some concerns about it: I skipped a lot of Tolkien’s poetry when I read Lord of the Rings, and long-form poems in general are not my thing. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised by how much I’m liking it so far. (It helps of course that I already read & liked the story in prose.)

I’ve also started reading Margaret Stohl’s Black Widow: Forever Red, which suffers a bit from not being my Natasha headcanon, ha - but we’ll see if Stohl wins me over to hers as I keep reading. I’ve only just started, so she’s got plenty of time.

What I Plan to Read Next

Warren Lewis’s The Splendid Century: Life in the France of Lewis XIV is waiting for me at the library. Warren Lewis is C. S. Lewis’s brother and mainly remembered for that these days, although (according to The Company They Keep) his books about French history are well-researched and well-wrought reads in their own right. I have long meant to learn more about France and this seemed like a good spur to give that a go.

Patrick O'Malley's Getting Grief Right: Finding Your Story of Love in the Sorrow of Loss is actually about the dangers of attempting to grieve "correctly," to fit grief into the one-size-fits-all template of the five stages of grief outlined by Kubler-Ross. O'Malley is a psychologist, and he gets a lot of clients who come in and tell him that since the death of their spouse/child/parent/parakeet they haven't been moving through the stages properly but got stuck on anger, or depression, or whatever, and in any case it's been nine months since they lost their loved one and the experts say that if you're still grieving after six you're probably cray-cray, so can he help them?

O'Malley has come around to the view that, insofar as help means "help them go through the five stages properly and get over their grief," he can't; most people don't grief neatly in five stages and, if the loss is big enough, lots of people feel at least occasional stabs of grief for the rest of their lives. But he can help them feel less like freaks by telling them that it's totally normal for grief to be chaotic and disorderly and to continue feeling a subterranean hum of grief long after society says you should be over it.

Now, I actually agree with a lot of the stuff in this book. I think our culture promotes a ludicrously foreshortened grief schedule, and we'd probably all be better off if we spent less time telling each other what we're allowed to feel - not even how we're allowed to express our feelings, mind, but what we're allowed to feel in the first place - and more just listening to what we actually do feel.

(I realize that "Have you considered therapy?" is often meant lovingly, and there are times when it needs to be said, but it has the sub-meaning "Your pain is so incredibly tedious that you can't expect anyone to listen to it if they're not actually getting paid." No wonder our society is so full of people who feel miserable and alone and believe to the bottom of their souls that they will only have value if they achieve success, as defined by money-making.)

Nonetheless, reading Getting Grief Right sometimes gave me the same feeling of exhaustion I get when I read, say, dietary studies, when it turns out that everything the previous generation of scientists said is wrong. Fat doesn't make you fat! Eggs are good for you after all! Margarine is in fact way less healthy than butter! Et cetera. Those old scientists got it all wrong, but you should totally believe us new scientists when we tell you carbs are evil.

And it's like, well, why? Why should I believe you this time round when you've gotten it wrong time and time again for the past hundred years? Why, in fact, should I believe psychiatrists about pretty much anything, if psychiatry as a profession finds it baffling that people, lots of people, indeed possibly the majority of people, might feel crushingly sad about the death of their loved ones for more than six months? This is a pretty damn basic thing to get wrong.

Twenty years from now, they're going to decide that carbs are fine but protein is totally making us fat, and also the by-then-orthodox method of grief through storytelling is straitjacketing us in our misery and we should actually grieve through interpretive dance or something.

I found John Kim's The Angry Therapist: A No BS Guide to Finding and Living Your Own Truth super frustrating, possibly because I took the title too literally and believed that he was going to be angry about something. The growing trend toward giving patients medication without therapy? The high cost of mental health care? The fact that American prisons are stuffed with mentally ill people who really ought to be in treatment, not incarcerated? The difficulties of getting insurance companies to pay for mental health care? Stigma around mental health problems?

I mean really, there are a lot of things a therapist could be angry about. But as far as I can tell, the thing that most grates Kim's cheese is the fact that sometimes the strict guidelines of therapeutic practice where he works make him feel stifled, which is... well, I'm sure it's frustrating, but it seems like a weirdly self-centered reason to call himself "The Angry Therapist."

This is in fact something I felt about the book in general: it's weirdly self-centered. Kim wants to help you find your best self, but he also wants you to know that he used to be a screenwriter - a successful screenwriter! He didn't become a therapist because the whole screenwriting thing didn't work out for him. He just realized that being a screenwriter wasn't fulfilling his true self, so he went back to school to study psychology.

And also he ran a high-end nightclub where he rubbed elbows with film stars. And also he created a start-up company called ModelInABottle.com which was staffed with models who were friends of his girlfriend at the time. Who was a model. Just FYI.

Holy humblebragging, Batman.

He also has a deeply aggravating imagined scene where he creates a Genuine Emotional Connection (tm) with a waitress by breaking free of the chains of phatic discourse. She asks how he's doing and instead of saying "Fine" like a normal person, he's all - I have to transcribe this, I'm sorry -

JOHN
You know what?

She instantly looks nervous.

JOHN
You've been asking people that all day. So, maybe I should ask you how you're doing?

She looks a bit shocked, confused, taken aback. She fumbles her words.

WAITRESS
Um...fine, tired. Been here since 10 AM. I can't wait to get home.

PROBABLY BECAUSE SHE WANTS TO GET AWAY FROM NOSY CUSTOMERS PRYING INTO THINGS THAT AREN'T THEIR BUSINESS. If you make your waitstaff look nervous, shocked, confused, and taken aback, that is probably a sign that you are doing something wrong.

(But of course the scene ends with the waitress smiling and grateful that someone has taken the time to treat her like a human being instead of just handing her the credit card for the check. "Thank you," she says, and John replies, "You're welcome.")

Do you know what I dread at work? People trying to create genuine emotional connections with me when all I want to do is take their coffee order and then finish filling the caramel bottles, or emptying the trash, or doing literally anything else because everything in the world is less taxing than having an emotionally meaningful conversation with a total stranger. I get paid $10 an hour! That buys you phatic discourse and an empty smile! There's a reason therapists charge $100 an hour for this shit!

...Having said this, I have friends who work retail who love it when people treat them like a human being rather than a coffee dispenser, so who knows, maybe your friendly local barista is just dying for a chance to tell a customer her feet hurt.

Otherwise, it's basically a bog-standard self-help book (live in the now, surround yourself with people who support the real you, etc. etc.). There are probably five dozen books at your local Barnes and Noble that will give you the same advice. Read one of them.