Lesson No. 1: Making comparisons can spoil your happiness. Once upon a time there was a young psychiatrist called Hector who was not very satisfied with himself. Hector is a man on a mission. He wants to find out what makes people happy so that he can help his patients become happy, too. He is baffled that so many of the people he sees are not happy, even when they have nothing wrong with them and life should be good. Hector and the Search for Happiness is written in a simple and straightforward style. Not quite Dick and Jane, but…
Tag: psychiatrist
Running With Scissors
You know, memoir is not court stenography. Memoir is not a video on YouTube. Memoir has a narrative. Memoirs, a good memoir, is a person’s experience, their memory, and how that experience mattered to them, emotionally and psychologically. Augusten Burroughs I’ve always liked memoirs, though I didn’t always know that I was watching a memoir. A Christmas Story is a fairy tale memoir. Little Big Man was a fake memoir. Most of the brilliant writing of David Sedaris is in the form of memoirs. Oprah yelled at James Frey for making stuff up in his memoir A Million Little Pieces.…