THE BOOK THAT READS YOU AS YOU READ IT

You’re turning the pages and a very strange – yet very nice – thing dawns on you. This book gets you.

Obviously the author (who might have died centuries back) never knew you at all. But they write as if they did.

It’s as if you’d confessed your secrets to them and then they’d gone off and written this work around what you’d told them – transformed, of course, into a story about people with different names or into an essay that doesn’t cite your case explicitly, but might as well do so, because it’s completely on target.

To be generously understood is nice of course – hence the pleasure – but it’s a bigger thing than that: It’s helpful, simply because feeling alone with difficult parts of oneself increases the trouble.

We’re often haunted by the worry that no reasonable person could feel anything but derision or contempt for our problems. We fear to share them with our friends because we anticipate bewildered rejection.

The book that understands us, is like an ideal parent or friend who makes it acceptable to suffer in the way we do. Our weirder sorrows – or enjoyments – are then recast as valid parts of human experience, which can be met with sympathy and kindness.