Beginning ~ with a question

No Happy Endings: A Memoir ~ by Nora McInerny, 2019, memoir, 288 pages

Life has a million different ways to kick you right in the chops.  We lose love, lose jobs, lose our sense of self.  For Nora McInerny, it was losing her husband, her father, and her unborn second child in one catastrophic year.

But in the wake of loss, we get to assemble something new from whatever is left behind.  Some circles call finding happiness after loss “Chapter 2” — the continuation of something else.  Today, Nora is remarried and mothers four children aged 16 months to 16 years.  While her new circumstances bring her extraordinary joy, they are also tinged with sadness over the loved ones she’s lost.

Life has made Nora a reluctant expert in hard conversations.  On her wildly popular podcast, she talks about painful experiences we inevitably face, and exposes the absurdity of the question “how are you?” that people often ask when we’re coping with the aftermath of emotional catastrophe.  She knows intimately that when your life falls apart, there’s a mad rush to be okay — to find a silver lining, to get to the happy ending.  In this, her second memoir, Nora offers a tragicomic exploration of the tension between finding happiness and holding space for the unhappy experiences that have shaped us.

No Happy Endings is a book for people living life after life has fallen apart.  It’s a book for people who know that they’re moving forward, not moving on.  It’s a book for people who know life isn’t always happy, but it isn’t the end:  there will be unimaginable joy and incomprehensible tragedy.  As Nora reminds us, there will be no happy endings — but there will be new beginnings.

I decided this was the next book I wanted to read when I noticed the title of Chapter 3 was Don't 'Should' Yourself.  I figured I could find an image of that, and I did.  Right beside it was the definition, not from the book itself, but from somebody "out there" on the internet somewhere.  I found them side by side:

Oh, you want me to share the book's beginning lines?  Okay, here are the first sentences from the Introduction and the first sentences from Chapter 1.  Chapter 3 and Don't 'Should' Yourself will have to wait until I get that far into the book.

Introduction

The question came from the back of the room and hung in the air long after it had been asked.  The tone was hopeful and anticipatory, as if the asker thought she was opening a gift for the entire audience.

"Are you . . . pregnant?"

Chapter 1

So you think you're ready to have a breakdown, do ya?  Well, take it from a woman who has spent more than one afternoon sobbing in her minivan in the Costco parking lot:  you're probably closer than you think you are.  And if not, getting there won't be as hard as you think.

Gilion at Rose City Reader hosts 

Book Beginnings on Fridays.  

(Yes, I know I'm a day late.)