Reviewing and rating memoirs is always difficult for me. How am I supposed to review someone’s life story? I try to review all books from a place of enjoyment instead of technical criticism, but I’m a bit conflicted here.

I watch Toni and Ryan’s podcast and when I realized that Toni wrote a book, I had to read it. Obvious book nerd here. I grabbed the audio through my library and was hooked after the first thirty minutes of listening. I bought  physical copy to immersion read with.

While I loved so many things about this memoir, I struggled with a few as well. I was often confused about the timeline because her stories were not in chronological order. The best memoirs, in my opinion, read like fiction or are meticulously organized. This was neither. 

I was struggling to find the overarching theme of the book or what messaging we were supposed to find as readers. Grief obviously played a huge role, which I really appreciated and the parts that included her mother made me cry, but this book felt more like a journal than a memoir.

Like I said, there were so many great moments in this book. I laughed, I cried, I took notes and I plan on following some of Toni’s advice. (I need a therapist.) Her stories were so relatable and I loved hearing about her love story with Taubs. Do I wish there was more Ryan? Yes. I feel as though she should write some blog post or something about her history with Ryan, since I feel like I know them both as a unit. I’d love to hear those stories.

Anyway, I really connected with Toni on having children (or the choice not to), embarrassing situations, and how grieving can suck ass.