A Lust for Life book club: Readers recommendation – How Not to be a Boy

Thanks to all of you who participated in the A Lust for Life book club so far!

This is another instalment in our book club reader’s recommendations.

If you have read the book already, or if you decide to bring it on your holidays, please do share your own thoughts with us using the hashtag #ALFLbookclub.

And if you have a book you’d like to recommend to our readers, please send a short review and a little about the impact the book had on your own life, mental health and wellbeing, to editor@alustforlife.com – we’d love to hear from you.

Review:

I read, veraciously, fantasy, true crime, comics, blogs, the back of cleaning products, anything I can lay my hands on, but my treat, reserved only for holidays is autobiographies. I like them, the funny stories and sweet vignettes and watching someone grow and it’s how I ended up with a copy of How Not To Be a Boy by Robert Webb, despite not being a fan of Peep Show or anything else he’s done really.

I grabbed it last minute leaving Dublin airport setting off to Lisbon on leg 1 of a trip to the Azores. I started it the day before we set off for home after a week of paradise, swimming in natural springs, hiking volcanic ridges, incredible meals all in the company of the first partner Ive ever wanted to spend my life with, the trip was perfect, and what had delayed my reading of it.

This book was not at all what I had expected, yes there were funny stories and cute anecdotes, but it was real and raw. A man writing honestly about his full range of feelings, his failures, errors and joys, and toward the end, thousands of feet in the air over the Atlantic, his feelings on the loss of his Mother.

And I got it, his anger and frustration at others for their lack of loss, and how people tried to compare losses when they couldn’t understand how it feels to have the rug pulled from you was so so real to me, having lost my Dad only a few months before and having to listen to people try and compare the loss of a parent to that of aunts or grandparents, I have lost all 4 grandparents and most of my mother’s siblings have passed, and it is incomparable. Sitting on a plane, I cried for the first time in months. Someone got it and had put it into words and I felt, and in that chapter I felt a little less alone and lost.

Sometimes I’ve been guilty of accepting the stoicism of some of the men around me, who have been taught to “man up” to “be tough” to never express their feelings, wants or needs, but the sheer honesty of this book, the hurts carried and scars formed by Webbs childhood have torn some of that away for me. I feel more inclined to check in with male friends and my partner if they are ok, honestly, and try better to be attuned. I try but I’m not perfect, and neither is this book, but I’m trying a little harder in several aspects of my life cause of its influence.