My heart is aching and full after reading this short, personal and profound meditation on personal change and reinvention by Vivek Shraya. In just 100 pages Shraya covers the reinvention surrounding ending/beginning friendships and romantic relationships, beauty culture and physical transformation, professional identity and ambition, and reinvention through artistic expression. The way she shares her own experiences feels like a friend is confiding in you and trusting you to understand. And her broader observations about why change and reinvention are not only inevitable, but powerful and necessary, are so valuable amid so many narratives around us that focus on persistence, endurance and "being yourself" as if we all have a core, immutable identity.

Reinvention requires both a kind of death and a desire to keep on living. And so at its core, reinvention is inextricably linked to hope: the hope that we can find another way, take another shape.