Curious, Healing

Books about healing, business, and fun

nonfiction

“The Gifts of Imperfection” by Brene Brown

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Subtitle: Let Go of Who You Think You’re Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are

Addtional subtitle: Your guide to a wholehearted life

Recommended to me by: Brene Brown’s Ted talk on vulnerability

Brene Brown studies shame resilience and wholehearted living by collecting people’s stories and searching for patterns of what works and what doesn’t. It turns out that perfectionism doesn’t work. Neither does changing ourselves to fit in. Nor seeking certainty.

What does work? Worthiness, rest, play, trust, faith, intuition, hope, authenticity, love, belonging, joy, gratitude, creativity. Embracing tenderness and vulnerability.

The four elements of shame resilience: Name it. Talk about it. Own your story. Tell your story. But only to someone who has earned the right to hear it and won’t shame you further.

The gifts of imperfection: courage, compassion, and connection. Courage – originally “speaking one’s mind by telling all of one’s heart.” Compassionate boundaries and accountability. “Compassionate people are boundaried people.” “Love and belonging are always uncertain.”

“Revolution might sound a little dramatic, but in this world, choosing authenticity and worthiness is an absolute act of resistance. Choosing to live and love with our whole hearts is an act of defiance. You’re going to confuse, piss off, and terrify a lot of people – including yourself.”

This book went by too fast. I wanted more of the validation and relief I felt as I read.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Tiger, Tiger” by Margaux Fragoso

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Recommended to me by: rushthatspeaks

This is Margaux Fragoso’s matter-of-fact memoir of growing up in Union City, New Jersey with an angry father who is a jeweler, a mentally ill mother who is often hospitalized, and a very complicated relationship with a pedophile, Peter.

I skipped whole chapters in the middle of this book, unable to read the detailed, oily dishonesty that twists a child’s desire to be pleasing and pleasant against herself, eventually manipulating her into holding still for rape.

Over the fourteen years that Margaux Fragoso was enmeshed with Peter, she continued to express her spirit and her boundaries as well. The story of her entrapment is also the story of how she survived and eventually flourished.

In the afterword, she notes, “that a sexual predator looks for children from troubled homes like mine, but that he can also trick average families into thinking he’s ordinary of even an upstanding member of the community.” If you have been the victim of such a predator’s deceit, this book is immensely validating.

Highly recommended for detailed, clear depictions of complex relationships, with a huge trigger warning for manipulation and sexual abuse.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Indie Publishing” edited by Ellen Lupton

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Subtitle: How to Design and Produce Your Own Book

Recommended to me by: Found on the library shelf in the self-publishing section, and renewed several times.

This is a quirky book with practical, detailed advice about self-publishing and designing books. I appreciate the information on choosing a page layout and some good typographical options.

I’m less enthusiastic about their choices for book examples, which tend toward the erotic. They also mention a specific print on demand company often enough to make me wonder if they get a kickback. Still, well worth reading for the design advice.

Available at biblio.com.

“Whipping Girl” by Julia Serano

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Subtitle: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity

An illuminating book. Julia Serano describes her own experience as a transsexual woman, including the identities she explored before deciding to transition, and the internal and external changes she noticed during transition. She uses her experiences, carefully supported with research, to call out some of our societal assumptions and prejudices about gender.

She proposes that we all have a subconscious sex from birth. For people in whom it matches the body’s sex, it remains unnoticed, and leads to the assumption that it matches for everyone. For people in whom it does not match, it causes ongoing deep pain and sadness. Changing the body’s sex and gender presentation relieves the pain and leads to a sense of rightness instead.

She argues that rather than being marginal in feminism, the treatment of transsexual women is a central issue. Transsexual women are discriminated against because they have chosen to move from a societally more valued class – men – to a societally less valued class – women. She sees transsexual men receiving much less discrimination because they don’t violate the societal preference for maleness.

She notes in the introduction that her biggest challenge in writing the book is addressing several audiences: transsexual people, non-trans academics in women’s, queer, and gender studies, and those who want to learn more about transsexuality and feminism. I fall in the third camp, and found myself less engaged by detailed discussions of academic framing of transsexuality, or interpersonal politics in LGBT groups.

At the same time, I’m glad the material was there. Now I’m aware that many academics view gender as entirely socially constructed, and that transsexuals tend to be marginalized in LGBT groups because many of them express gender in a more stereotypically masculine or feminine way.

She argues that it is femininity itself which is devalued and under attack, being equated with weakness, passivity, and artifice. I see her point that she became more connected with her emotions when she started taking estrogen, and that emotions are devalued in our culture. I also see that women (and men) can enjoy dressing up to please themselves.

At the same time, I struggled with her assertion that femininity is natural. Many attributes I associate with femininity (rather than femaleness) are artificial and mandated by the patriarchy: dieting, makeup to appear youthful, hair sculpted with toxic chemicals, high heels, uncomfortable movement-impairing clothing, etc.

I agree that we need to accept each person’s gender expression as equally valuable, while also working to remove patriarchal manipulations of the expression of femininity (and masculinity as well).

Highly recommended to anyone interested in better understanding feminism, sexism, and transsexuality.

Available at bookshop.org.

“Undefended Love” by Jett Psaris and Marlena Lyons

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A thought-provoking book, more profound than I expected. Refreshingly, both same-gender and opposite-gender couples are used for the examples.

The authors warn several times to be sure a relationship is not abusive before using it as a crucible for personal work. This is a warning that’s missing from most relationship books I’ve read, which instead blithely assure the reader that one-sided work can fix everything.

The requirements for a close relationship are covered first: Reciprocity, Entitlement, Approval, Consensus, and Trustworthiness, conveniently abbreviated REACT.

In an non-abusive, close relationship, conflicts can help the partners look inward to discover their “Cracked Identity,” pass through the agony of the Black Hole instead of defending against it, and emerge into peaceful, joyous essence on the other side.

This is similar to the process of accepting and integrating past trauma, so that all made sense to me.

I was less comfortable with the hierarchy of needs, wants, desires, preferences, and no preferences. It’s too easy for me to pretend my needs aren’t important when I know it’s “more enlightened” not to have preferences at all. At the same time, I know that an issue will be much less urgent for me if I have processed past associations with it.

Despite the much-needed warnings about abusive relationships, I am still uneasy about the power dynamics that aren’t addressed. Calmly witnessing someone’s deep personal work takes training, and it’s not necessarily healthy for couples to act as therapists for each other. Also, saying that it’s better to act from essence than from personality is yet another judgment of ourselves and each other.

That said, the more people healing their inner wounds, the better!

Available at bookshop.org.

“The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down” by Anne Fadiman

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Subtitle: A Hmong child, her American doctors, and the collision of two cultures

Recommended to me by: Emily Ross

This is a beautifully written history of the Hmong people from Laos in the 20th century, interwoven with the story of one Hmong family who took refuge in Merced, California. Their daughter Lia Lee had her first epileptic seizure at age 4 months. Both the family and Lia’s doctors struggle with her illness and with the communication barriers between their cultures.

The Lees are frustrated because Lia continues to have seizures, and her prescribed medicines cause side-effects they don’t expect. The doctors are frustrated because the Lees don’t speak English and “aren’t compliant” with the medicine schedule. Also, the Lees have very little money.

Dr. Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist and medical anthropologist at Harvard Medical School, developed a set of eight questions to elicit a patient’s “explanatory model.” After getting to know the Lees, Anne Fadiman answers the eight questions from their perspective. The American doctors continue full-tilt in their own medical explanatory model, unable to consider a different model.

  1. What do you call the problem?
    Qaug dab peg. That means the spirit catches you and you fall down.
  2. What do you think has caused the problem?
    Soul loss.
  3. Why do you think it started when it did?
    Lia’s sister Yer slammed the door and Lia’s soul was frightened out of her body.
  4. What do you think the sickness does? How does it work?
    It makes Lia shake and fall down. It works because a spirit called a dab is catching her.
  5. How severe is the sickness? Will it have a short or long course?
    Why are you asking us those questions? If you are a good doctor, you should know the answers yourself.
  6. What kind of treatment do you think the patient should receive? What are the most important results you hope she receives from this treatment?
    You should give Lia medicine to take for a week but no longer. After she is well, she should stop taking the medicine. […]
  7. What are the chief problems the sickness has caused?
    It has made us sad to see Lia hurt, and it has made us angry at Yer.
  8. What do you fear most about the sickness?
    That Lia’s soul will never return.

My only issue with the book is that chapters about Hmong history are inserted at cliff-hanger portions of Lia’s story, causing me to flip ahead and find out what happens to her. The history is worth reading in its own right and doesn’t need manufactured suspense to pull the reader through it.

Recommended to anyone who wants to learn about Hmong culture and history, medical communication at its worst and best, and the story of one much-loved child.

Available at bookshop.org.