Empathy and acceptance can be beautiful.

3.4 stars

A beautiful plea to remember those on the fringes or those born into difficulty—who don't neatly fit into drawn lines—are often the best at reinvention. Those who forge a different looking path, who are thrust into hardship or unbelonging can lean into creative meaning and make beauty.

Stuck between 3.5 and 4 stars. 4 stars because it's so hopeful and honest and inclusive. Because it made me hopeful, because I grinned like an idiot reading it. 3.5 because it sometimes rambled and it's repetitive of the Chronology of Water, which remains one of my very favorite books.

Wow. The reviews for this book are bananas.

It’s slight and powerful. Lots to think about.

"When did we forget that we are not the stories we tell ourselves?"

I admire Lidia Yuknavitch: for her honesty, her brilliance, her resilience and for her genius way of writing. Having just finished [b:The Chronology of Water|9214995|The Chronology of Water|Lidia Yuknavitch|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1336629501s/9214995.jpg|14094773] I couldn't not read this. This book does exactly what it says on the tin: It is a manifesto for/ about misfits. Lidia Yuknavitch uses her own experience as well as the experiences of fellow misfits to paint a picture of what being a misfit can mean and what we all can learn from them. She makes a powerful statement on the importance of art and of channeling pain into something greater. She shows how she has found a place in the world, after many many a detour. She shows how her weaknesses can be her strength and the place where beautiful art develops.

I think, the main problem for me was that I read it so shortly after the masterpiece that was The Chronology of Water. That book just blew my mind and there was no way a book that is essentially the longform of a TED talk to even come close to its structural brilliance. She also rehashes a lot of that book but in way that creates a narrative - and I thought the strength of her other book was that she did not do that. She told of her life in fragmented, poem-like chapters. This narrative created afterwards feels somehow less true to life.

Still, she can spin beautiful sentences like hardly anybody else and her voice and viewpoint is an important one. I adore that she ultimately arrived in a place of strength and how she uses that strength to try and make the world a better one.

First sentences: "Misfit. Trust me when I say there is a lot packed into that little word."

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I received an arc of this book curtesy of NetGalley and Simon & Schuster in exchange for an honest review.

a nice reminder that alive and struggling is enough, even if your version of alive is a little more crooked and bumpy and off-center than was expected.

That alone is review enough to read the book:

I’m just like you. I’m moving through my life one day at a time, and some-times, on the hard days, even an hour at a time.

I’m trying to help us remember that we invent our own beauty and our own paths and our own bent, weird ways of doing things, and that they’re not nothing and they matter, too. We’re the half of culture that doesn’t take the paths that are lying right in front of us.

Our song may be a little off-key, but it’s a kind of beauty, too. I know I’m not the only person who thought that up, but I can sure stand up and help remind us not to give up, that we have a song, too.