Recommendations

People Places Things

This is a film about a break-up and parenting and adulting. It’s a beautiful, perfect gem of a movie; I LOVED it. It made me LOL, and also SAB.* The main character (played by Jemaine Clement) is a graphic novelist, and the artworks “he creates” (Gray Williams is the actual artist) are moving and gorgeous and complement the story perfectly. Did you notice I mentioned the word “perfect” twice? YEAH. Watch this film.

So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

I read this book at the end of last year, but, even though months have since passed, it’s still the one I think of when people ask for a book recommendation (actually, it’s the one I think of until people ask me for a book recommendation, at which point I say, “Um… Oh, gosh… I know I had one… Let me think about it for a bit and see if it comes back to me”). It made me think and it also changed the way I think, and it was funny and gracious and fascinating in what appears to be a typically Ronson-y manner.

Dear Sugar Radio podcast

I ended up at this podcast after listening to a Magic Lessons episode featuring Cheryl Strayed, who, since I read and saw Wild, has become someone I’m interested in, in the same weird, not-stalkery-but-still-not-completely-normal way I feel about Jennifer Aniston. I love her writing (I’m currently reading her first novel, Torch), but I’d read only one Dear Sugar column in my life before hearing this podcast. I’ve since read many more and have filled my Quotes file with things like

She had to do more than hold on. She had to reach. She had to want it more than she’d ever wanted anything. She had to grab like a drowning girl for every good thing that came her way and she had to swim like fuck away from every bad thing. She had to count the years and let them roll by, to grow up and then run as far as she could in the direction of her best and happiest dreams across the bridge that was built by her own desire to heal. (From this column.)

and

I’ll never know and neither will you of the life you don’t choose. We’ll only know that whatever that sister life was, it was important and beautiful and not ours. It was the ghost ship that didn’t carry us. There’s nothing to do but salute it from the shore. (From this one.)

The podcast features Strayed and Steve Almond as agony aunts, answering letters about a range of topics with insight and love and optimism and wisdom. Listening always feels like therapy, even the episodes that don’t relate to me at all. My hope is that by absorbing every single one (some possibly numerous times), a bit of the grace that Strayed and Almond repeatedly extend to their letter-writers will rub off on me and I’ll learn to be kinder to myself and to others.

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*Sniffle A Bit