Take a photo of a barcode or cover
kurtwombat 's review for:
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
fast-paced
Maria Bamford is one of my favorite comediennes but with this book she has unleashed a whirlwind. (maybe less so in print but I listened to the audiobook and there certainly weren’t any brakes on that bus) She is a sort of living miracle. Beset with myriad mental health conditions, the “cult”s of the title refer affectionately to the various 12 step or self help programs she has leaned on to greater and lesser degrees much of her adult life. The miracle is how she has managed to navigate these troubled seas jumping from one ship to another balancing various strong medications along the way yet still manage to have a productive and creative career. Her humor bites and chews—spitting herself all over the page. I began this expecting more humor than health talk—and it was an adjustment seeing that the humor is the wrapping paper for a mental health memoir. Blunt is too subtle a word—maybe concussive better describes how a lot of the talk hit me. Fascinating but not always fun. Thought at first listening to it in small doses would help—make the subject matter and the pace and rhythm of her humor and delivery easier to digest. However, I found I enjoyed it more if I just plunged in and adapted. Getting in and out of a violent river is just exhausting—better to stay in and get used to it. And the longer I stayed in, the funnier it got. And the deeper the conversational revelations became. Certainly not for everyone—has to be one of the more DNF’d books on GOODREADS in recent years. I found it rewarding, encouraging and enlightening so stick with it.