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Let’s be real. Behind our Instagram-ready selfies, our polished Facebook profiles, and our masterful Pinterest epigrams, most of us are a bit of a mess. Almost everyone is or at least feels like a misfit at times. We have all sorts of neuroses that we’re really planning to work on at some point once we buy the perfect journaling materials, and we’re still waiting for that moment where we feel like real adults. (It’s coming, right?) That’s why it’s so great to read the new releases in this week’s book club, all about our fellow messes who made it, but in a real and human way. They never really stopped the messiness of life; they just either embraced it, made it better, or both.
<em>30 Before 30: How I Made a Mess of My 20s, and You Can Too</em>
Shifrin spent much of her 20s like most do; she drifted a bit, failed a bit, complained a lot. The child of Russian immigrants who constantly reminded her how lucky she was to live in America, she eventually one night over wine with a friend realized they hadn’t yet done what they wanted to in life, so they made a list of thirty things to do before 30: “No rules. No impossibilities. Only a timeline.”
<em>Okay Fine Whatever: The Year I Went From Being Afraid of Everything to Only Being Afraid of Most Things</em>
Courtenay Hameister was “a toe-dipper. A cringer. A wait-and-see-er.” From not being able to jump off the high dive at eight to not being able to have a real adult relationship until 34, she had always felt like the ultimate wuss. She wasn’t even happy at her awesome job as host of Live Wire, a nationally syndicated public radio show where she interviewed friendly celebrities and tried not to throw up out of fear… every. Single. Show.
<em>My Life as a Goddess: A Memoir Through Unpopular Culture</em>
Guy Branum was born “wrong” and out of step with his rural farming hometown of Yuba City, California. He was an overweight half-Jewish gay man who loved Greek mythology instead of guns and pickup trucks, and his childhood aspiration was to be a waitress, not a football player. “I grew up in a place with no dreams… Greek myths made me feel connected to the important stuff.” The most important thing mythology taught him, though, was in the story of Leto, consort to Zeus and mother to Apollo, who obediently suffered Hera’s curses before she remembered one very important thing: She was a goddess too.
