Name: Fully Functioning Human (Almost)
ISBN: 9781473639164

Melanie Murphy

In her first book, Irish YouTuber Melanie Murphy shares a series of experiences from the struggle that is growing up in the digital age: cyberbullying, dumping by text, gaining (and then losing) too much weight, having acne in a world of Instagram filters, and, most of all, finding the strength to tackle poor mental health. From self-image struggles to important life lessons about family, friendship, love and mindset, Fully Functioning Human (Almost) is a warm, illuminating memoir full of wit and wisdom that doubles up as a life guide for millennials.

Living in an Online/Offline World

Fully Functioning Human (Almost)

Jo Young

What an amazing book! I've been looking forward to reading this ever since Melanie started talking about it on her YouTube channel. This book is super relatable, and has lots of amazing advice. Her experiences are so lovely to read, especially as she gives advice about how to not worry about making mistakes and live your life without fear.

Grace O'Callaghan

Melanie Murphy is an Irish YouTuber who makes videos about food, health, sexuality, beauty and so much more. I don’t really watch any ‘lifestyle’ channels but Mel’s is the exception. She just talks so openly about everything (perhaps sharing a little too much at times) and just has a very positive personality in her videos, but it I wasn’t always like that.

Here Melanie presents a memoir/ advice book about everything she’s learned from living through depression, eating disorders, body dysmorphia, coming out as bisexual and becoming a YouTuber. 

This was such a great book. I can count on one hand the amount of nonfiction books I’ve truly enjoyed, and this was one of them. Mel writes exactly as she talks and her personality just shines through. You can clearly tell that she’s passionate about every word she puts on the page.

I would never usually pick up a book that’s advertised as an ‘advice book’ because I find them quite condescending. Almost as if they’re telling you what to do rather than suggesting things to do. But I did not find this condescending at all. Mel is clearly talking about her own experiences and that what works for her may not work for you.

My favourite part of this book was definitely the format. In quick and manageable chapters there aren’t pages and pages of daunting nonfiction information but manageable chunks broken up by lists and drawings that left me saying to myself ‘just one more’. I loved that there were different sections for different subjects. You can see that she really focused on what she was writing about instead of writing her life story in chronological order.

Whilst I’d say that this book was for the most part well researched, I found issue with some of the food chapters. Mel just calls some foods healthy that I wouldn’t call healthy and some foods unhealthy that I’d call healthy. Obviously, I don’t know exactly what is and isn’t healthy, but I’m just saying to do some research of your own before listening to every word of advice.

All in all, I just found it to be a very raw and real book. Mel talks openly about her struggles with her mental health as well as talking about female masturbation which is such a taboo topic. I think this book would be particularly helpful to teens and people in there 20s. At least it resonated with me. I don’t think I’d recommend it if you aren’t a fan of Melanie’s. Her personality is very clear in her writing so I don’t think you’d enjoy it if you don’t like her.

Fully Functioning Human (Almost) Living in an Online/Offline World

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