“Sooooo I thought this was sort of a summary of some of the juicier bits from the podcast. It is not that. It’s much more memoir, personal essays, etc. Which I should’ve known, my fault for not reading the description. Although also a little their fault for using the signoff from their true crime show and then starting off the book talking about bad boyfriends and bad teenage friendships. Which isn’t what I was looking for. I think Karen Kilgariff is mostly hilarious, Georgia Hardstack I don’t know much about, but when I listened to My Favorite Murder, it wasn’t my thing. I figured that maybe some of the same info and jokes in book form would work better for me, but I guess that’s not in the cards for now.
Not exactly the Halloween read I was looking for. So, unstarred because I hope that means it’s just not fed into the equation for an overall star total, not that it’s zero stars?
I do take umbrage with one thing. Hardstack said that any time someone talks about a crazy ex-girlfriend, that’s because a guy done her wrong, broke up with her in a weird way, forcing her to be crazy. I don’t think it’s anyone’s fault when they get cheated on or discover they’re the other woman, buuuuuuuut I do think we can take responsibility for how we react to these sorts of things. I don’t think that being treated poorly in a relationship means you’ll necessarily respond by throwing a brick through someone’s window or relentlessly texting them or whatever. If you do those things in the heat of the moment, you have to learn to forgive yourself, AND I think you have to ask yourself the hard question of how you’re going to make sure that’s not how you react next time things go poorly.
I’m clearly not the target audience for this book because I am not, nor have I ever been, a teenage girl. So I can relate, but not hard. This felt like an “Aimirite, ladies?” moment, and maybe when ladies read this, they’re like, “Fuck yeah!” But I’m not ladies, so I was like, “I don’t know if that’s right, but I’m not going to answer because that was a question for the ladies. I’ll save it for my blog, which is basically Goodreads these days.”
Weirdly, this is the FOURTH thing I’ve experienced this week that’s all about how you shouldn’t work a shitty office job and should get out in the world and do your thing. And it’s the FOURTH thing that gives that advice without any practical method to do so. It’s like me advising people “Everyone should be in shape,” and then when it comes to the first concrete steps, it’s like, “I don’t know. Just keep doing stuff and it sort of happens.”
No, it doesn’t. I’m here to tell you definitively that it doesn’t just happen.
The reason it SEEMS like that is because you only hear from the people who write books like this and have careers like this. You don’t actually hear from the thousands of other people who also work very hard at things they’re passionate about and never are able to do those things full time.
That’s my advice. Keep doing the thing because it’s fulfilling. Work hard to minimize the time you spend doing your office work, the work you do for money, and maximize your time and energy that’s left for the other stuff. But just know that you’ll probably never get there.
And that is why I don’t write books of advice. Amirite, ladies?”