No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work

I snuck in a book between books.

I was checking out a book that I had on hold at the library and this one was screaming at me from the 14-day loan shelf. Maybe it was the colorful cover, maybe it was the fact I've been working through a lot of emotions with people at work. Either way, it spoke to me. And, after what was a really quick read, I can say I learned some things in this book that will be helpful as I manage a newsroom full of dynamic personalities.

I've read a few leadership/workplace books and I don't always love them. I find most can be easily synthesized into an article or a 15-minute podcast. This one is really no different, but even skimming through it and reading the high points was beneficial.

The idea is to get away from the old school of thought that you should ignore your emotions at work. We're told early on - especially women - that we shouldn't be ruled by our emotions and that we should never EVER cry at work. It's unrealistic. And, it's especially unrealistic when we're working now with generations of people who have been taught not to keep their emotions inside. I also work in a TV newsroom where emotions often run high due to stressful deadlines, a collaborative environment and really emotional stories and interviews. This book is about not hiding those emotions, but how to better sort them and use them to your advantage, not your detriment.

I find this book would be more valuable for someone earlier on in their career. I'd really recommend it for any woman in her 20's who is finding her way through a career and a life. I don't mean that men couldn't benefit from it; but I do know women are more often seen as emotional and even hysterical for showing any emotion at all. We're (largely) ruled more by that emotion. This book could absolutely help.

For me - an old lady manager - there were still lessons to be learned. It was good to better understand (better remember, really) those times when work is the center of your universe and you were trying to navigate through the balance of emotion and your day-to-day responsibilities. It talks about how to make tough life decisions, how to avoid being a "chronic venter" and when to reset for your own sanity.

Each chapter includes real-life examples and takeaways on each topic. It also includes an assessment of determining your emotions at work and how to manage them.

Again, it's a quick read and I'd recommend it especially for young women early in their careers.

The Wife

I had to sit with this one a minute to truly appreciate what was a pretty remarkable book. It came at me so simply, so quietly, that I initially forgot to write about it when I wrote reviews of books that I read on my vacation. But, don't let that fool you; this is a story worth reading.

Married to a famous novelist on his way to accept a major award, Joan Castleman makes a monumental decision: she's going to leave him, finally, after all these years. When she describes their union and the comfortable simplicity of it, you can't help but question her decision. But, as the novel unfolds and describes the years of their lives leading up to that day, you see how the decision had been smoldering for some time.

Wolitzer lays out the story of a strong woman - a strong woman - who has held back and held her tongue to allow her husband's career to unfold. She's given up her own writing to support him, appear at his side and raise their children.  There are times she seems almost okay with that, accepting of the life she chose. That's the duty of a wife, after all, isn't it?

"Everyone needs a wife," Wolitzer writes. "Even wives need wives. They tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites, picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. 'Listen,' we say. 'Everything will be okay.' And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is."

Until one day, we decide we don't want to live for someone else anymore.

The story is written simply and beautifully and it almost seems boring at times. But, you find yourself so compelled to see how she ends it. Then, Wolitzer throws in a twist that you never see coming (or at least I didn't!) and she finally gets her due.

Turns out they made a movie of this - with Glenn Close, no less! Here's the trailer if movies are more your thing.

The Gifted School

Bruce Holsinger hit the timing jackpot.

His book The Gifted School, about a group of Colorado parents who will seemingly stop at nothing to get their kids into a new magnet school for incredibly gifted children, came out in the wake of the Aunt Becky scandal. You know, Aunt Becky from Full House and that whole thing? Yeah, it's a pretty timely release. 

I heard Holsinger - and, heard about this book - on enough interviews and podcasts, I had to pull the trigger. What I found inside these pages was enough helicopter parent drama to last a lifetime.

The group of parents live in the fictional town of Crystal, which Holsinger describes as politically progressive and virtually void of anyone who isn't a shade of lily white. Like all places, there's an intense desire for perfection, or at least the appearance of perfection. Holsinger describes a world of gifted programs, resume-building extracurriculars, secret pill popping and traveling soccer teams. It didn't have to be Crystal. It could be practically any suburb in America.

The families have been close since the moms met in a mom-and-baby swimming class. But their friendships mask the intense competition beneath. When a new school is announced with a rigorous testing process, the parents go to extreme lengths just to get their kids accepted. They want it more for the status than the academic experience. And, predictably, they lose themselves along the way.

The book is, as I mentioned, timely. It's plausible, for sure. It's entertaining and it's a bit juicy. I just finished watching Big Little Lies and this storyline could easily take place in that show and vice versa. But, it wasn't as satisfying as I expected. With several families described, it was often distracting to keep the characters straight. The story had, perhaps, too many smaller subplots. And, I don't think any of the characters are actually worth rooting for. Still, it carried me. It held me. And there's one twist at the end that I didn't at all see coming.

I gave this book a 3-star rating on Good Reads. Entertaining? Sure. Compelling? Maybe not. Realistic? Frighteningly so.

City of Girls

Prepare yourself to be sickened, perhaps, at the love I'm about to dump all over this beautiful book.

At first, a bit of a caveat. Books you read on vacation are almost always going to feel better than ones you read at home. And, here's where I read this book.

(I didn't read it out there on the paddleboard, but I did read it between paddles on the shore of this incredible lake.) 

The setting matters. Not just the setting of the book, but your setting and frame of mind when you're reading it. That said, I'm confident I could read this book anywhere and would have just as quickly fallen in love.

Where do I start with my unbridled adulation?

I'll start by saying I wasn't sure this book would live up to the hype. Because Elizabeth Gilbert it and because of the success of Eat, Pray, Love, it was going to get some attention. I read a couple previews and was attracted to the premise - life in the 1940s in New York City, surrounded by sex, booze and showgirls. Then, I heard Gilbert on the Armchair Expert podcast (which you should be listening to, by the way). The way she talked about this book and the strong female characters had me absolutely hooked. I haven't bought a book in quite awhile, but the number of "holds" on this book at the library was going to make the wait unbearable. So I went to the bookstore on my birthday and bought it, then waited for my lake vacation to crack it open.

Then, I fell in love.

This book tells the story of a young woman named Vivian who flunks out of Vassar and is sent to live with her aunt in New York City. The aunt runs a ragtag theater, struggling to survive. Vivian is thrust into a world of show business, showgirls, feathers and sex, completely different from everything she knew before. She quickly gets lost in the glamour of it all and Gilbert takes you right down with her.

It's told as a letter Vivian is writing to a woman named Angela. You know immediately that Vivian had a relationship with Angela's father, but you don't know until almost the end who that man is and why he mattered so much in Vivian's life. It's a wonderful narrative technique that added a layer of mystery underneath an otherwise uncomplicated story. (I won't give away the twist, but I will tell you this: it's deeply satisfied when it's revealed). You see Vivian's life all the way through, as she confronts the mistakes she's made, the family she's left behind and the ultimate conclusion that leads her to happiness.

The premise of the book is interesting enough. The characters are rich, the plot is compelling. The pages fly by. But, that's not what makes this my favorite book of 2019 so far (maybe it's a tie for #1. It's definitely up there.) What made me fall in love is the way she writes about women that sold me and had me weeping as I read the last page.

Vivian is a woman who loves sex. She loves men. She chases desire, often at the expense of others. And, she doesn't apologize for it. "The only two things I've ever been good at in this world are sex and sewing," she says. As soon as she stops apologizing for that - and for the mistakes she makes because of that desire - she truly begins to live.

Damn, y'all. 

That's powerful stuff. 

It's reminiscent of two of my other favorite books in recent years - Daisy Jones & the Six and Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. Each are about strong, unapologetic women. Each are told through a unique narrative. If you like any of the three, you'd like them all.

I loved this book. I devoured this book. I'm evangelizing for this book. If you can read it by a beautiful mountain lake, even better... 

Florida

This analogy is going to take a minute, so bear with me.

I do triathlons. By "do", I mean I slog through a couple sprint triathlons every year. I'm relatively slow, but I love it. And, I especially love the swim because it's something I'm actually pretty freaking good at.

So, before my first tri of the season last weekend, I hopped in the water to warm up. Most swimmers in these races do that, but they maybe just get in to feel the water, test their goggles, etc. I get in and I swim HARD. That's because I've figured out over the years that it takes me a good 100 meters or so to really feel like my shoulders are warmed up.

What does this have to do with anything? I'm getting there.

That relatively long warm up (especially for a swim that's only half a mile) is analogous to why I've never been a fan of short stories. When I read - like when I swim - it takes me awhile to get warmed up. With short stories, I feel like I'm just getting warmed up and it's already over.

Still, I picked up Florida at the library. I had read too many good things about Lauren Groff and this particular collection. It tempted me despite all my past feelings about short stories.

Florida is a collection of stories set in the state that's a million short stories waiting to happen. I don't mean that in a "Florida man" kind of way, with face eating and other weird stories that are enough to populate an entire Twitter account. But, between the weather and the swamps and the creatures, Florida really is rich with potential fiction.

These stories include everything from two little girls trapped alone on an island to a woman waiting out a hurricane in her old house, all alone. They're incredibly rich and incredibly written. How Groff packs so much into 20 pages or so is well beyond me. Each story was interesting enough to stand on its own and each one contained so much detail, the characters and the settings truly came alive.

Still (and back to that analogy that started this rambling), I never really felt like my shoulders warmed up.

I just don't think short stories are for me. I will say, though, that Groff's writing was so fantastic, I'll be looking into her longer fiction. I can absolutely see why this collection received the accolades it did.

Nine Perfect Strangers

I needed a big, fat juicy summer read. I've been reading about Abe Lincoln and family violence and other not-so-pleasant topics. I needed to sink my guilty teeth into something more pleasurable - and, I found it in a pretty obvious place.

I haven't read any of Liane Moriarty's books, but I'm deep into Big Little Lies on HBO (in fact, I'm sitting here trying to watch it, but HBO Now is down... first world problems). I just had a feeling this book was too "easy" and derivative and I was kind of being snobby about it. I thought I had it all mapped out (you know, book going one way, shocking twist at the most predictable point.) But, it was at the library on the 14-day loan shelf and it's summer, so I dove in.

You know what? It was fantastic for exactly the reasons I wasn't going to read it in the first place.

In the book, a group of strangers all end up at a fancy health resort. They're from all walks of life, totally different in a Breakfast Club kind of way. Like said breakfast club, they've come for different reasons, or so it appears, and they hand their lives over to an enigmatic leader named Masha. She promises that they will be different people when they leave. She promises the transforming experience they came for. She starts by forcing five days of silence, hands over the mandated smoothies and get down to business.

They quickly realize they're basically trapped. And that's not the least of their problems.

Sounds like a good old beach read, right?

And, it totally is.

But, there's some deeper elements, too. You realize that while all the strangers are there for different reasons, they're all really there to help get back a piece of themselves that they lost. How they'll end up finding it here is really up to interpretation. But, for whatever reason, this 400+ page book flew by,

Sometimes, you just need to stop overthinking it. Sometimes it's okay to grab the beach read.

Courting Mr. Lincoln

I wanted so badly to love this book. I wanted it so much, in fact, that when it wasn't moving quickly enough, I set it aside and read another book, only to come back a week later to finish.

It just wasn't for me.

It should have been for me, by all accounts. I have a lifelong obsession with our 16th president (he's clearly the sexiest of them all.) This is a fictional account of his courtship with Mary Todd and also a close friendship with a man named Joshua Speed. It's about early politics, his ascension to prominence and the woman who would become his wife. While history remembers Mary Todd Lincoln as a grieving, possibly insane woman, this book sets her up as a witty young woman, well-versed in the politics of the day.

This book is extremely well-written. In lesser hands, I probably wouldn't have made it past the first 50 pages. His writing and the overall story arc were just interesting enough to keep me going, but after the first half, I just kept willing myself to finish.

You just shouldn't have to work so hard, especially on a book you read in the summer.

Sorry, Abe. Nothing personal. You're still the most handsome of them all. 

The Immortalists

We're all busy. I'll save you the trouble. Go read this book. It's remarkable and you'll love it.

But, if you've stuck around...

I needed a good one. If you've read my last few reviews, you'll know I'm due for a book that doesn't bore or disappoint me. I even stopped reading one halfway through to read this one, which I never do. It was totally worth it.

Despite this book getting really great reviews, I hadn't heard of it until I saw it on the shelf at the library. Books on the "14-day loan" shelf are usually the good ones and the plot of this one sounded intriguing. 

It's the story of four siblings in New York who, in the late 1960s, visit a woman who can supposedly tell you the day you're going to die. They each go in alone and they never share with each other what she told them. The book then details each of their lives and how they lived with that knowledge.

If you knew the day you were going to die, how would you live your life? With extreme care? With complete reckless abandon? And, even if you didn't believe that the fortune could be correct, could you ever stop thinking about that day?

The choices each of the characters make will have you questioning how you would live - and, maybe how you're living now. There are moments of heartbreak, of shock, of reverence. It's also a book about family and the good times and tragedies that tie us together.

I loved this book. LOVED this book. Here's hoping this is the beginning of a hot streak...