Our Selection of Books for Uncertain Days

Once again Bryony Gordon shifts our perspective on mental health with her openness about everything that helped her. Written during the first lockdown, this is a book steeped in the anxieties that came with the pandemic but its ideas for what people can do and where they can seek help are timeless. Responding to the huge gap between talking about our mental health and getting actual support with it, there is tons of advice here on the things to do, places to seek out, and ways to just get through the day. Tips on breathing, sleep, and diet sit next to navigating the NHS. Support to seek out includes Improving Access to Psychological Therapies Service, Recovery Colleges, and Maytree.

“We are all a messy mass of contradictions, hidden in human form. When did I start to feel normal? When I realised that there was no such thing as normal, and that we’re all as screwed up as each other. Screwed up in different ways, yes, but screwed up all the same.” — Bryony Gordon

Matt Haig’s books (and let’s be honest his Instagram account) again and again and again have made our own lives make sense. His is a voice of understanding, up close, what life is like lived in the round. We devoured his first book Reasons to Stay Alive, which felt like an actual person talking to us about their actual emotional and psychological life, and letting us in on the secret that we were there with them too. This is on our shelf of books to open at any page, on any day, and find something meaningful. The follow-up Notes on a Nervous Planet, had us connecting the dots between what’s happening with us and what’s happening with the world around us—also questioning screen time, social media, and our ever more present digital lives. Matt Haig opens the world for us about what we’re feeling and maybe even why—plus he makes the best lists, ever.

“One of the key symptoms of depression is to see no hope. No future. Far from the tunnel having light at the end of it, it seems like it is blocked at both ends, and you are inside it. So if I could have only known the future, that there would be one far brighter than anything I’d experienced, then one end of that tunnel would have been blown to pieces, and I could have faced the light. So the fact that this book exists is proof that depression lies. Depression makes you think things that are wrong.” — Matt Haig

An anthology of hope to keep by the bedside table, mental health campaigner Jonny Benjamin and editor Britt Pfluger bring together 101 voices for overcoming adversity. Assembling ‘wounded healers’ — Carl Jung’s expression for people who have ‘been there’ — including journalists, poets, magicians, academics, doctors, podcasters, stand-up comics, economists, musicians, and actors, who talk widely about such things as diagnosis, suicidal ideation, acceptance, the concept of recovery, medications, therapy, postnatal depression and PTSD. A book that will expand your perspective and your sense of what’s possible even in the bleakest moments. We turn to it for its openness to sharing what has worked for people in their own mental health situations, without judgment or prejudice. 

“Hope is a small word with a big resonance. Four letters which encompass so much, linked together by infinitesimal nuance, and which, when spoken in one short syllable, can mean the difference between carrying on and dropping into oblivion.” – Elizabeth Day

“These are the moments I live for, when I suddenly see a link between a scientific idea I know well and a human problem I have been struggling with.”

Dr. Camilla Pang who has ASD (autism spectrum disorder), ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) and GAD (generalized anxiety disorder) gives us her own guide to life, one based on science. In this fascinating book (and the winner of The Royal Society Science Book Prize 2020), Dr. Pang draws parallels between how science and humans operate: like how understanding cancer cells can explain how we might better collaborate, how game theory can help negotiate social etiquette and how light refraction can help alleviate our anxieties. Explaining Humans gives vital frameworks for both neurotypical and neurodivergent readers to understand more of the crazy, complicated ways we humans work, making sense of what often feels confounding.

“Where humans are ambiguous, often contradictory, and hard to understand, science is trustworthy and clear. It doesn’t lie to you, mask its meaning or talk behind your back… I had found something to help explain the thing that confused me most: other humans. As someone who has constantly sought certainty in a world that often refuses to provide it, science has been my staunchest ally and most trusted friend.” — Dr. Camilla Pang

This is the book with which to liberate yourself. Reading Glennon Doyle’s third memoir is an exercise in learning how she pushed against her boundaries so that you may push against your own. Doyle tells stories of captivity and how to defy it — from the first story of a caged cheetah learning its instincts when the tourists aren’t watching to her tearing down her good-enough marriage that she had been told should sustain her but didn’t. Doyle stokes tender fires that might just burn your house down so that you may bravely rise from its ashes. There’s a terrifying possibility within this book of living life, rather than fearing it.

“We hurt people, and we are hurt by people. We feel left out, envious, not good enough, sick, and tired. We have unrealized dreams and deep regrets. We are certain that we were meant for more and that we don’t even deserve what we have. We feel ecstatic and then numb. We wish our parents had done better by us. We wish we could do better by our children. We betray. We are betrayed. We lie and we are lied to. We say good-bye to animals, to places, to people we cannot live without. We are so afraid of dying. Also: of living. We have fallen in love and out of love, and people have fallen in love and out of love with us. We wonder if what happened to us that night might mean we can never be touched again without fear. We live with rage bubbling. We are sweaty, bloated, gassy, oily. We love our children, we long for children, we do not want children. We are at war with our bodies, our minds, our souls. We are at war with one another. We wish we’d said all those things while they were still here. They’re still here, and we’re still not saying those things. We know we won’t. We don’t understand ourselves. We don’t understand why we hurt those we love. We want to be forgiven. We cannot forgive. We don’t understand God. We believe. We absolutely do not believe. We are lonely. We want to be left alone. We want to belong. We want to be loved. We want to be loved. We want to be loved.” — Glennon Doyle

In this book, clinical psychologist Dr. Emma Hepburn (also known as The Psychology Mum) recognizes that everyone has mental health and offers a personalized toolkit for managing our own. Consisting of evidence-based exercises — in the same playful immediate style of her popular Instagram account — that include such things are defining your mental health jam-jar, making a values sign-post, and knowing the state of your capacity cup, Dr. Hepburn helps you create building blocks to better understand your own life and bring in more of what you need. Open, encouraging, and understanding, this is a book that can help you have a positive relationship with your mind even as your life’s circumstances shift.

“Mental health is something that we all have and need to look after proactively. We need to understand that, just like physical health, mental health is changeable and can vary throughout life. It sometimes needs extra care, and given the right (or wrong) mix of situations and person, anyone’s mental health might suffer.” — Dr. Emma Hepburn

This poetry collection blew us away with its precision and wisdom. So many sentences that carried clarity about our own experiences—of relationships, body image, being a woman, coming of age, and mental health. Charly Cox writes through her vulnerability to bring thoughts, realizations and feelings that are so familiar to us and that we felt have been unsaid, maybe even to ourselves. A gorgeous, brave voice of a mind untethered, a life searching, a longing for connection.

“Your mind is biased

And your brain is blind

There’s still a store of strength

Left in you to find.”

— Charly Cox

Esmé Weijun Wang’s collection of essays is like a reality check on schizophrenia. She systematically takes on all the tropes of mental illness and then works to counter them—taking on diagnosis and the mighty DSM-5, her relationship to medication, what it really means to present as high functioning (rd. brown silk Marc Jacobs blouse), why going to Yale is not a cure and the natural hierarchy that appears in psychiatric hospitals. She’s frank, clear, and persistent in her efforts to understand her own mind and how her life and our perceptions of her life are conditioned by many, many competing narratives. Complex, exploratory, and a shift in the story that we think might be schizophrenia.

“When a certain kind of psychic detachment occurs, I retrieve my ribbon; I tie it around my ankle. I tell myself that should delusion come to call, or hallucinations crowd my senses again, I might be able to wrangle some sense out of the senseless. I tell myself that if I must live with a slippery mind, I want to know how to tether it too.”

— Esmé Weijun Wang

Oh my god, go read this book. We thought we needed sleep (and to attend to like 17 deeply-rooted character-flaws) but it turns out, no. Just needed this book. Samantha Irby’s writing on what we think we mean by adulting, relationships, money, brand-name snacks, her own mental health, the world outside of the ‘liberal North Shore enclave where no one blinks an eye at your Liberal Gay Blackness’, is so funny and raw and honest and heartbreaking, sometimes all in the same sentence. We even read our favorite paragraphs—one of which is below—to each other. Like just this line: “but there I was, trying to fit the ocean into a plastic cup as it tossed and turned me in its waves.” We could quote and quote and quote but we won’t, just read it.

“But I’m going to need you to love me on the bus, dude. And first thing in the morning. Also, when I’m drunk and refuse to shut up about getting McNuggets from the drive-thru. When I fall asleep in the middle of that movie you paid extra to see in IMAX. When I wear the flowered robe I got at Walmart and the sweatpants I made into sweatshorts to bed. When I am blasting “More and More” by Blood Sweat & Tears at seven on a Sunday morning while cleaning the kitchen and fucking up your mom’s frittata recipe. When I bring a half dozen gross, mangled kittens home to foster for a few nights and they shit everywhere and pee on your side of the bed. When I go “grocery shopping” and come back with only a bag of Fritos and five pounds of pork tenderloin. When I’m sick and stumbling around the crib with half a roll of toilet paper shoved in each nostril. When I beg you fourteen times to read something I’ve written, then get mad when you tell me what you don’t like about it and I call you an uneducated idiot piece of shit. Lovebird city.”

— Samantha Irby

Olivia Potts has written a beautiful memoir of how she baked herself out of her life as a barrister following the unexpected death of her beloved mother. In the background, creating granular layers of another kind, is Pott’s lifelong relationship with anxiety, which she’d inherited, from her mum for whom ‘no activity, from cross-stitch to tennis, was truly safe.’ It’s an interesting read in controlling outcomes (pastry rather than life), the reasons why we shift course (dramatic life events) and preparing to cheat at CBT on the tube.

“Well, I am my mother’s daughter. I inherited her dark straight hair, her voice and her laugh, her competitive nature, but it is her anxiety that rose above all the other similarities like a flare. That’s how it felt, every time almost anything bad, or potentially bad, or even just new happened: it was like someone had set off a flare within me, which whooshed up through my body until my head filled with blinding light, and with one overwhelming thought: something terrible had happened. Someone I loved was dead.”

— Olivia Potts

Billed as ‘The Men’s Headspace Manual’, we just came across this book co-published with the UK-based mental health charity, Mind. It takes on the fact that suicide is one of the biggest killers of men under the age of forty-five and that many more men than our media and wellness industries suggest contend with issues of depression and anxiety. With chapters covering physical health, work, the pursuit of happiness and purpose, as well as our prevailing attitudes to who men are and can be today, what masculinity means, and how to orientate ourselves within socially and culturally defined expectations around gender, this book is chock full of exercises, advice, and resources. A much-needed corrective to our ideas of who gets to think about their mental health.

“To be honest, most of the advice in this book applies to anyone. But I want to speak to men in particular because it’s really important that you know it applies to you. I’ve heard men being told to ‘kick depression in the balls’, ‘show anxiety who’s boss’ and so on. The idea that men can dominate mental health if only they’re strong enough (because, you know, that’s what men do) is ridiculous. Looking after your mind is not like finally scaling Everest or K2, it’s not something to ‘conquer.’”

— Rotimi Akinsete

How to sum up Oliver Sacks? That feels like an impossible task. Not just because he was a prolific writer—right up until his death writing the wonderful Gratitude—but also his case studies and his notes on his own life are extensive and nuanced and memorable. As people who are searching for answers to a confounding mental health issue, we’ve often turned to Sacks (also a professor of neurology and a physician) for narratives that step outside ‘the normal’. We’ve been drawn to his compassion and push for understanding people and situations that seem to defy categorization.

“Humans share much with other animals—the basic needs of food and drink or sleep, for example—but there are additional mental and emotional needs and desires which are perhaps unique to us. To live on a day-to-day basis is insufficient for human beings; we need to transcend, transport, escape; we need meaning, understanding, and explanation; we need to see overall patterns in our lives. We need hope, the sense of a future. And we need freedom (or at least the illusion of freedom) to get beyond ourselves, whether with telescopes and microscopes and our ever-burgeoning technology or in states of mind which allow us to travel to other worlds, to transcend our immediate surroundings. We need detachment of this sort as much as we need engagement in our lives.”

— Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations

This book made the rounds of our friends. It seems like we’re drawn to funny and quirky stories around mental health! Maybe that’s the language we understand most: the one that’s messy and imperfect and human. Writer Jenny Lawson sought to take on her depression in a different way: "I've often thought that people with severe depression have developed such a well for experiencing extreme emotion that they might be able to experience extreme joy in a way that ‘normal people' also might never understand. And that's what Furiously Happy is all about." There’s definitely something here about getting the tenor of this book. We tentatively handed it to the next person then breathed a sigh of relief when they understood why we loved it. We hope you do too.

“Depression is like … when you don’t want cheese anymore. Even though it’s cheese.”

— Jenny Lawson

Megan Griswold’s powerful memoir The Book of Help had us questioning how and why we search for the answers to our life’s questions. Working harder than most on herself, this book details all the different practices, therapies, gurus, belief systems (Christian science, wilderness training, Biodynamic Gardening, Rolfing, Feng Shui, Shamanic Journeying, and on and on), that Griswold negotiated from childhood up until now. Open, funny, striving for understanding of self and others, Griswold is a courageous narrator who tries to find the meaning inherent in a situation or relationship, and the shiny nuggets that indicate learning and possible ways forward.

“Looking for a therapist mid-crisis is like being asked to calmly search for a life raft while drowning.” — Megan Griswold

Anxiety is a beast to be tamed, eradicated, done away with in whatever way we can. Isn’t that the narrative that we’ve become accustomed to? We strive and shift our coping strategies, we seek solutions and fixes. But as magazine writer Sarah Wilson says right off the bat, for her, after a life-long struggle with anxiety, she’s ready to abandon all of that for a kinder, gentler, relationship with “that gut-twisting, grip-from-behind, heart-sinking feeling that winds me in tighter spirals and makes everything go faster and with so much urgency”. With her memoir, Wilson makes the argument for a different kind of storytelling. One in which the busy, fretful mind of anxiety that she has known since childhood is not violently silenced, but quietened and befriended, an acceptance of what is along with what is still possible. Her memoir suggests that anxiety can be present while still living a good life.

“Do you think it might be lovelier if we bundle up our uncertainty, fear, late-night over-thinking and kooky coping habits, tuck them gently under our arm, and see where they take us?”

— Sarah Wilson