Buy the F*cking Lilies: And Other Tools to Fix Your Life, from Someone Who's Been There

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It stopped being cute about halfway in and started feeling like a desperate way to appear hip and cool and connect to the younger generation. You cannot take care of others, your family or coworkers, no matter, unless you are already taking care of yourself.

Part self help and part memoir, I consider this to be a self improvement book for “old millennials”. Keep a budget, but get regular pedicures for self care - if you don’t, it’s definitely because you have a poor relationship with your monstrous mother.As previously noted, you can't trust someone who idolizes Coco Chanel, but the biggest problem here is that this is self-help from a person who 1. Today, Tara Schuster is a happy and fulfilled “self-care ninja”, and as Comedy Central's Vice President of Talent and Development, is by all outward appearances (and by her own account) living a healthy and successful life. For example, Tara on one page says that the phrase Sunday funday is “excruciating” then refers to herself as “T-Money” more times than I could count.

When someone says they went to a really nice private school, followed by Brown University, and then flippantly states how "poor" they were, it irks me to no end. Like, maybe she mentioned it so often as a contrast to how much "better" she is now, but it started to feel more like she wanted to prove how cool she was?

It’s always helpful to have a reminder to stop the negative thoughts about yourself—like that you’re a failure because you don’t have a boyfriend/the job you want/you aren’t working out or eating well enough and so on. It’s authentic without being preachy, and while I listened to it, I’m also so glad to have a hard copy so I can underline. I think this book fails, though, because in trying to relate, the author came off as pretty unrelatable to me. If the focus is supposed to be "rituals to fix your life" I thought there was perhaps too much emphasis on describing the past. Divorce, fights, your parents losing their jobs, fights with your boyfriend, you possibly losing your job, being too high, not knowing yourself, those were the things my life was made up of.

Her plays have been performed in the New York International Fringe Festival and her writing has appeared in The New Yorker online. What I admire about this book over other self-help bestsellers I won’t name is that Schuster is not ignoring the validity of mental illness as an obstacle.I’ve already been recommending it to my IRL friends :) I don’t often read self-improvement (aka self-help), but now and again I’ll come across one that really speaks to me. I was expecting empowerment but I ended up disliking the author's voice - it seemed a bit self absorbed. I don't know how you could live for a year in a house with gynecological equipment rotting in your front yard and not turn that into a hilarious anecdote?