"Grief strips you skinless. Skin is important not just for looks, but because without it, you are just a walking pile of exposed nerve endings. That's really the only way to describe our family right now, a bunch of skinless freaks brushing up against our memories just to feel the pain."

I think it's rare when a line/passage/essay/book speaks to me in such a specific how-did-you-know-me-so-well-stranger? type of way that I have to stop reading to pull my jaw off the ground and then grab a pen or my phone so I can write the damn thing down and hold it close to me again in the future when I need it next. That's why I reach so much. I'm constantly striving to have that moment with a text and I surprised myself having this connection with this tragic-comic memoir. I mean, the title alone is pretty great and too true.

I know my own literary voice and I know that those of other semi-depressed, fairly privileged millennial women are going to frequently bowl me over with their relatable, overwrought words—to be fair overwrought, overly sarcastic tones are my favorite. I am longwinded and often too serious or emotional so when Nora McInerny started to rag on herself for her personal insecurities while, in the same breath, described the hardest moment of her young life (miscarrying just before her father and husband each died of cancer in the span of just a few weeks), I started to pay closer attention.

"These are the diamonds I picked from the darkness, that shine with meaning only for me."

I've never gone through anything as heartbreaking as that which Nora did, becoming a widow so young just after her mother was also widowed and trying to figure out how to pick herself up... and yet her words of encouragement could easily be taken out of context in order to help almost anyone no matter the hardship. And so, I found this book at the perfect time. As I question everything about myself, my place in the world, what my next steps will be careerwise when this crisis is over, and turn over every log and stone in search of hope, I was all too glad to find a little bit of it here, laughing at Nora's crass words and crying for her loss, wondering if I can adopt a big of her big personality in order to get myself through to tomorrow and the next day and the next until I feel more like me.

"If you ask me how I am, I'll tell you reflexively that I'm okay. And it's true, for the most part. And when you tell me the same thing, I'll know that it's mostly true for you, too. Because you're working hard to be that way. Not because it's easy."