Name: What If This Were Enough?
ISBN: 9780385542883

Heather Havrilesky

"Heather Havrilesky attempts to disrupt our cultural delusions and false dichotomies, to unearth moralistic interpretations of mundane human behaviors and interrogate so-called mistakes that we've slowly internalized, and to question the glorification of suffering, dishonesty, romantic fantasy, conquest, predation, and perfectionism"--

Essays

What If This Were Enough?

sarah

When you leave my mother's house, it's true that you might feel some relief at the thought of returning to the comforts of modern life. But when you get back to your own house, your ordinary windows and doors that shut tightly will feel like a disappointment. Your dry California air and your swimming pool will feel like trifles compared to trees so tall they disap- pear into the sky. I used to think that my mother's house was embarrassing, a ramshackle mess in a small town, nothing and nowhere. Now I know that my mother's house is the center of the universe. There is no other place like it.

JoAnna

Havrilesky is a brilliant critic & essayist. Reading this, I get the feeling that she's been through a lot of pressure, which gave shape to her opinions in this book. Her insistence that this moment is enough, in an age constantly demanding more of us (whether through personal social media branding or the endless quest for self-betterment) feels refreshing: it's nice to hear from a critic that we all need to take a damn breather and chill the fuck out. I especially appreciated her discussion of the self-help guru vs. the artist in A Scourge of Gurus. 

Taking off one star because her style is convoluted at times, and may feel excessive in trying to prove a point.

Jun Angelo Cabuguas

i really enjoyed this book, a great last chapter, although playing house was by far my favorite essay. it felt like i was having a series of realizations while reading this one, good stuff

Dara Skolnick

I didn't disagree with much in this book as I was reading it -- a lot of the essays mirrored my own feelings. That said, they were so cynical that it's making me reconsider my own cynicism, now that I've seen it so clearly mirrored back at me. The energy of this book is not at all how I want to feel, or what I want to put out into the world, so maybe it was a helpful read after all.

Imane

When I started this book I joked about how Heather Havrilesky walked to Jia Tolentino could run but that was giving the author too much credit. This book is aggressively mediocre. It is chock-full of ham-fisted pseudo analyses that fail to deliver any type of point or to explore any topic beyond the surface, which leads to extremely superficial and judgmental takes presented as truth bombs. Havrilesky has a bizarre fixation on millenials, on their laziness, on their quest for pleasures, on how they think they deserve anything when they don't, on how screen-obsessed they are, and so on and so forth. This felt very "old man shakes fist at the sky and yells at clouds" to be honest. In the same chapter, the author obsesses over "young foodies", aka a mythical class of people that think Yelp is a bible and that squanders their parents' money on fancy food, and in the same breath, she makes a dig at the rate of unemployment amongst millenials. This is one of the many example in this book where the author showcases her inability to 1. connect dots and 2. make any kind of meaningful statement. Somehow, she conflates completely disparate groups of people (the unemployed youth on the one hand and the privileged on the other) in order to justify her tendency for bitter, lacklustre and quite frankly intellectually dishonest opinions. And again, this is just one example out of many.

Though the essays weren't absolutely offensive, they did grate and made me feel like I was wasting my time. It might sound harsh but I think Havrilesky should stick to advice column because she lacks the vantage point, the finger on the pulse of society, the subtlety and the capacity to form meaningful thoughts in order to posture as a cultural critic. 

I'd highly suggest you to pass this book, unless you want to read at times dull, and more often than not eye-roll inducing surface level rants with the occasional creeping undertone of meritocracy. It's not the worst book I've read, but it is a disappointment of criminal proportions in literary form.

Jeremy Cote

I thought this was an interesting collection of essays. I thought some of them were a bit heavy on the television references (I learned later that she was a TV critic), and I also found she was harsh at some points, but I really enjoyed the last essay. It was a perfect way to end it, and I would say she saved the best for last.

Zane Shannon

*A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2018* *A Bustle Best Nonfiction Book of 2018* *One of Chicago Tribune's Favorite Books by Women in 2018* *A Self Best Book of 2018 to Buy for the Bookworm in Your Life* By the acclaimed critic, memoirist, and advice columnist behind the popular "Ask Polly," an impassioned collection tackling our obsession with self-improvement and urging readers to embrace the imperfections of the everyday Heather Havrilesky's writing has been called "whip-smart and profanely funny" (Entertainment Weekly) and "required reading for all humans" (Celeste Ng). In her work for New York, The Baffler, The New York Times Magazine, and The Atlantic, as well as in "Ask Polly," her advice column for The Cut, she dispenses a singular, cutting wisdom--an ability to inspire, provoke, and put a name to our most insidious cultural delusions. What If This Were Enough? is a mantra and a clarion call. In its chapters--many of them original to the book, others expanded from their initial publication--Havrilesky takes on those cultural forces that shape us. We've convinced ourselves, she says, that salvation can be delivered only in the form of new products, new technologies, new lifestyles. From the allure of materialism to our misunderstandings of romance and success, Havrilesky deconstructs some of the most poisonous and misleading messages we ingest today, all the while suggesting new ways to navigate our increasingly bewildering world. Through her incisive and witty inquiries, Havrilesky urges us to reject the pursuit of a shiny, shallow future that will never come. These timely, provocative, and often hilarious essays suggest an embrace of the flawed, a connection with what already is, who we already are, what we already have. She asks us to consider: What if this were enough? Our salvation, Havrilesky says, can be found right here, right now, in this imperfect moment.

What If This Were Enough? Essays

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