Books to give you hope: How to Be a Person in the World by Heather Havrilesky

Havrilesky’s funny, grumpy and helpful collected advice offers hearteningly realistic encouragement to the 21st-century worrier

One of the premises of How to Be a Person in the World is that we’re all in this big, stinking mess together. If you are alive, you probably, at some point in your life, felt a wreck, aimless, suffered an important loss, thought yourself an impostor, or worried that others have more friends, more fun, more of their shit together – or all of the above. You might be an overthinker. Indeed, if you’ve ever wondered what the hell is the point of anything in this crumbling world, you might find solace in Heather Havrilesky’s book.

How to Be a Person in the World is made up of a selection of letters, some from Havrilesky’s Ask Polly column, which she currently writes for New York Magazine’s The Cut (and previously for the Awl). Ask Polly tackles readers’ questions on anxieties about the modern world and its technologies but also issues ranging from grief to sexual assault. Its key message being: the way you’re feeling is OK.

This caught me by surprise. I hadn’t ever paid much attention to advice columns, other than flirting with Cheryl Strayed’s Dear Sugar articles in the Rumpus – but somehow the prescriptive tone, even if offered without judgment and and being funny and clever, never seemed quite right. It would be inspiring for a bit, and then it would always get supremely annoying.

And then I discovered Heather Havrilesky. She is not only an excellent writer and cultural critic, but the best possible agony aunt for people who don’t care for agony aunts. She combines a fierce optimism about humans and their ability to take control of their own lives with a messiness and hilarious grumpiness that does feel like you’re talking to a great, moody, mildly aggressive friend. And she has an exceptional ability to hit the nail on the head and fundamentally understand people, regardless of whether she’s tackling commitment issues, friendship conflicts, creative block or how to live with an STD. She gets it.

Here is the thunderous end of her answer to a 25-year-old who is lost in a sea of self-doubt and demotivation:

Life is not about knowing. Life is about feeling your way through the dark. If you say, ‘This should be lighter by now,’ you’re shutting yourself off from your own happiness. So let there be darkness. Get down on your knees, and crawl to the dark. Crawl and say to yourself, ‘Holy GOD, it’s dark, but just look at me crawl! I can crawl like a motherfucker.’

Havrilesky is not always that intense – she can be ridiculously funny as well. The way she puts down a man who is convinced that having an affair is the right thing to do for his marriage (he’s put together a list of supporting evidence!) is worth the cover price alone. Her use of pop culture references to add to her points can also be hilarious – see her fantastic stretching of a Kanye West metaphor “beyond the breaking point” or this piece using the Hemsworth brothers as the embodiment of unavailable men fantasies.

My favourite thing about Ask Polly is that it is fantastic proof of how the internet can bring people together in an honest, true way. Havrilesky has been writing advice on the internet since the early dotcom days. In paper form, the writing is addictive. Even if the format is perfect for bite-sized reading, I – and everyone I know who has read it – devoured pretty much in one go.

So, if you ever feel like everyone else has it all figured out, pick up this book. Hell, do it even if you’re entirely together and well-adjusted. It might surprise you.

As the writer herself said in a recent interview with the Call Your Girlfriend podcast, she doesn’t see herself as someone especially qualified to be in the business – and burgeoning literary genre – of delivering epiphanies to people with life crises. She has had her share of bad times. But Ask Polly stands out against other self-help writing because, as Havrilesky herself says: “I’m very against seeming like I know special things.” Her aim, as opposed to the big-problem approach of Strayed’s or Oprah’s heavenly touch, is more to “lead by bad example. I’m at the halfway point – you want to get up to where I am and hopefully surpass me.”

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