Book Review: How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay by Jenny Lawson

Book Title: How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay
Author: Jenny Lawson
Rating: ★★★★★
Link to Book: [Amazon]

I went into How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay knowing that I love Jenny Lawson’s writing. This isn’t my first book by her, I started back on The Bloggess with an amazing post about towels and a giant metal chicken. A post I still recommend to people til this day! This book hit a little differently than all the others though. It still has her signature style of writing and her chaotic sense of humor, but there was so much more woven into this one. A touch of ‘I’ve been through a lot and I’m trying to survive’ and that’s exactly what this book is – how to survive life.

What I liked the most about this book was it is a self-help book in a way, but it does not give off some sort of fake premise that everything is fixable if you just try hard enough. It’s more realistic. It’s messy and nonlinear and sometimes it jumps around in a way that may not make sense if you read it front to back, but it makes perfect sense if you read the chapters in the manner that she mentions in them. Read this when you are feeling this way, read this when you can’t do this, these are being used in place of direct quotes from the book. I like that it doesn’t try to force you towards better, instead it gives you coping mechanisms that help the author and it admits that sometimes, the goal is literally just existing.

This is a collection of thoughts, reminders, and tiny lifelines you can grab onto whenever you need them. Some things felt a little obvious, but not in a bad way. It was like reading something you had already heard before, but then realizing that you needed to hear it and maybe had actually forgotten it at some point along the way. There’s an amazing balance of humor and heaviness, and I really needed this book due to a lot of things going on in my real life that I cannot talk about right this moment.

Overall: I loved this book. It’s not perfect or polished and it’s exactly what makes it so perfectly itself. It’s something that I will be buying and adding to my shelf to reference back to as often as I can. It reminds you that “okay” is okay, it’s okay to breathe and get through the day when your brain is fighting you every step of the way. It’s okay to be yourself. It’s very human, very real, very comforting. Like picking up a book and it whispering “Hey… this sucks, but you’re not alone.”

This book was received for free in exchange for an honest review. 🙂 Thank you.