This book was gifted to me for my 40th birthday. Alas, it read and felt throughout like Haig was phoning it in, almost literally. Like he was on the line dictating it to a publisher's transcriber to meet a contractual quota. I finished its last 20 pages last night over a gin and tonic in bed, and I woke up not remembering much of anything from the entire thing.

I like Haig a lot and devoured Notes on a Nervous Planet and The Midnight Library, as an audiobook delivered by Carey Mulligan. I did not like this book. It's bloated to be more than 200 pages, with a lot of truisms and tropes recast slightly to sound useful or newish. Those are interspersed with too many pages comprised of one sentence each or a single line repeated four to ten times on that page (or, peculiarly, even spilling two or three of them onto the next). There's a random recipe, and a half-baked list of movies that inspire or reaffirm one thing or another. All I recall is Jaws was on that list.

That's not to say there's not some hard-won wisdom in this hardbound tome. Haig's life experiences are incredibly tough. They are hard. I wish it didn't seem his writing here was so soft. There's an over-reliance on quotes from other notables, especially the doubling-down on Marcus Aurelius' meditations, shew. I honestly hope he returns to fiction after this, as I'm not sure his life experiences in the present are qualifying the quantity of self-help output.