The Good

Magical thinking is well and truly slain in How to Hold a Grudge: From Resentment to Contentment – The Power of Grudges to Transform Your Life.  It is a call to live with our feet firmly planted on the ground and come to terms with what is really happening – in the actions of others and in ourselves.  The process involves very practical tips and steps for coming to terms with the reality of harsh situations and doing the right thing in response.

Its starting point is “the unchanging fact that people, intentionally and unintentionally, will regularly hurt, inconvenience and infuriate us throughout our lives, unless we go and live in a cabin in some remote woods, with no wifi and miles away from all other human beings”. We don’t want to sugarcoat things more than we have to and we want to ensure that there is some justice in our lives and in the world!  So, what do we do about it? We follow Sophie Hannah’s Grudge-fold Path.  This is finding the famous middle way between clinging to anger and bitterness to such an extent that they ruin our lives, or forgiving everybody straightaway, making light of what happened while repressing our understandable and justified hurt or rage (Denial! As the sharks say to Marlin in the movie Finding Nemo).

It is a very practical way of acknowledging and processing anger into the productive result it is intended for:  protection and restoration of our boundaries and those of others, as well as the healing of trauma.  It helps us to observe our anger rather than become our anger.  Although Sophie Hannah says she could never follow the Buddhist Eight-fold Path, what she puts forward is a mindful way of working with all emotions that arise in response to a grudge-worthy event.

Each chapter deals with philosophical ideas, practical steps, and pitfalls for dealing with different aspects of holding grudges.  Each chapter ends with a case study demonstrating how the process can be applied to a real-life example.  The cases become more extreme as we progress through the book.  Hannah also classifies, categorises and grades many kinds of treatment that we should not put up with.  She is clear that giving ourselves permission to care in a serious way about how we are treated will lead most of us to also automatically extend that care to others.  Thus, the personal becomes political.  In addition, there are guidelines for discerning what are invalid, bad and / or toxic grudges.  Obviously, the recommendation is to ditch those immediately, and consider getting therapy.  By the same token, she invites us all to see how we have provoked grudges in others and what to do about that.  For balance, we are also reminded to create a list of stories that acknowledge what we are grateful for.

Hannah is the first to acknowledge that holding and processing grudges is not for everyone.  She encourages avid grudge holders, along with those of us who have trouble doing so, to read all the way to the end, if only to be affirmed in the first case, or to understand avid grudge holders in the second.  I tend to fall into the second group and I have to say that this book has been an eye-opener for me that has changed my life.  I have come to appreciate how properly processed grudges offer:

• Protection by reminding us of a valuable life lesson we have learned
• A witness that the experience matters
• Motivation to act differently or prove a label wrong
• Acknowledgement that the grudge-sparking behaviour is not okay
• Symbolic justice through the trace left of the ill treatment suffered, making it possible to forgive and move on if we choose to

Anyone who has trouble with protecting their own boundaries, questions their personal worth, or questions their right to take up space on this planet will find that this book guides you towards a healthier regard for yourself and validates expecting the same from others.  You will also develop realistic expectations of others and yourself (since she deals with the grudges we can hold against ourselves too). Through these exercises you will articulate your own personal value system more clearly as well.

To cap it all off, this book is funny.  I laughed out loud on a number of occasions.  Don’t worry, though, you can read How To Hold A Grudge in public, unlike some books by a Swedish author and journalist that have me rolling on the floor from start to finish. 

As with anything, the depth and seriousness with which you take this on will determine how much you get out of it.  WARNING!  It has the potential to rock your world.  Grudges that you thought were mere trifles might turn out to be much more serious than initially assumed.  This happened to me!  The process also has the potential to alter your core beliefs.  By the end of it you will likely think and act differently.  This is the point.  Doing so could drastically change your life.  It might be more than you bargained for, though.

The Bad

I had to work to find things to write in this section.  This book earned a 4.8 star rating because Hannah covers all the bases for a good how-to book!

My grudge with Sophie Hannah is her tone.  There are moments when she comes across as a bit of a know-it-all. I wondered whether it was  just the voice in my head reading her this way, but it comes through when you listen to her on her podcast too.  Of course, there is a high chance that I find this annoying because her style mirrors something that I am learning to accept about myself, befriend and moderate.

The author refers to the difficult and intense emotions as negative.  I think we all understand what she means, but I have learned the importance of discerning the message that they have for us rather than giving them a valence.  The irony is that this whole book is precisely about accessing the message in the emotion!  It is a very practical way of learning to listen to what anger, shame, grief, sadness and hate have to teach us.

The only other real issue I have is Hannah’s time estimate for processing a grudge.  She says it will initially take you about 2 hours and with practice it will take a mere hour.  This has not been my experience.  It can take considerably longer depending on:

• how practiced and comfortable you are with writing, 
• how perfectionist you are, and 
• how intense the experience and lessons are.  

You may have to break down and cry, rant, go for a run, work in the garden, eat a slice of cake etc., to keep the process going. You may also discover you have to go for therapy.

The How to

Identify the right thing to do

Sophie Hannah describes her process of how to hold a grudge in detail.  After writing down the grudge, categorising it, and grading it, comes the part of extracting the lessons.  If you could rewrite the story, what of your actions would you change?  The focus is only on your actions because you can’t change what your grudgee did to you!  Then, you rewrite the story including your fictitious different actions along with the different results they would have reaped.

Now you place the two versions next to one another, read them and ask yourself:  Is the strength of your feeling around this raw grudge due to either:

1. frustration at being unable to change the past, or
2. anger at yourself for nor having done the obvious right thing(s) to do?

Identifying the Right Things To Do (RTTD) is the practice I want to tell you about here.  

You will have identified the right things to do that didn’t get done when you looked at what actions you would change.  Beating yourself up about these takes your attention and energy away from what the right thing to do is in the here and now.  We can’t change the past, and those right-things-to-do now no longer exist.  The first step is accepting this reality.

The next step is identifying the present moment right things to do (RTTDs) by looking at what you would have done differently and seeing if there is anything on the list that you can still do.  If there is something that you can still and should do now, do it!  Take any action that you could take to right a wrong in your grudge story, always with the aim of righting a wrong, not with the aim of taking revenge!  If you discover a correct and feasible action would remove your grudge, then perform it rather than holding the grudge!

The next present moment RTTD is to learn all the lessons offered by the story.  Which of those lessons can be implemented this moment?  Like for instance making sure your children know that stealing is something they must never, ever do.  Which of those lessons should be implemented the next time a similar situation arises?  Which of those lessons should be applied to your relationship with the person in question going forward?

I find thinking about the RTTD so powerful because it doesn’t only apply to processing a grudge-sparking incident.  Asking ourselves this question in the midst of a difficult situation could be the difference between sparking a grudge in someone else and resolving it.  I have heard people say that it is better to do the right thing than to be right!  

There is a third instant where identifying the RTTD and doing it applies.  This is when you know that someone holds a grudge against you.  Take the time to consider what you can or should say or do, assuming that you agree that you wrongfully caused someone else harm.  How might you set things right now, and would you be willing to try? Would you be willing to accept rejection?  Other people are under no obligation to accept your apology.

The rest of the process includes being grateful for what this experience has taught you by listing the benefits that have accrued to you.  Accept any residual bad feelings you may have towards your grudgee but don’t act on them!  Vent to yourself if needs be.  Eventually they will dissipate, especially as you start to reap the benefits of all you have learned.  If you are still plagued by the incident, Hannah recommends getting therapy.

Conclusion

The central tenet of this book is “Do No Harm”.  It is about seeing people as they are and letting them be them while not letting them walk all over you.  The Grudge-fold Path offers a structure or a container to work with our resentments.  Think of it as the alchemist’s crucible, the mortar and pestle that Baba Yaga flies about in, Noah’s Ark that rides above the flood, the tent that protects the pilgrim from the dust storm.  It is full of humour, compassion and grace towards the reader, as well as the people who commit grudge-worthy acts (i.e. all of us). I suspect that people who are already holding good grudges don’t need this book.  If you are like me, however, who falls into the category of those who tend not to hold grudges, you might find this book changes your life – for the better.  

The Good

Bird by Bird is to writers what good sex education is to teenagers or good period preparation is to soon-to-be menstruators.  Mechanics without meaning get everyone nowhere fast.  Facts over feelings and foibles isolate and silence us.  Anne Lamott keeps these mistakes miles away by addressing mechanics and meaning, facts, feelings and foibles all together.  In the book we learn about

• why we write, 
• what and who we write for, 
• what we write about and how we write it, 
• as well as what gets in the way. 

The challenges that come with trying to write, be it for private or public consumption, take center stage.  

Writing is not for everyone, but if you try it on for size, you might be surprised.  Who better to go on the journey with than Anne Lamott?  She will make you laugh and cry and cringe.  She will also get you to the goal while teaching you a few things about life along the way.  It’s not for nothing that a 25th Anniversary edition is now available both in print and electronically.

The author takes you on the adventure of your life.  You will have mindfulness down pat by the time you have learned to think and act like a writer.  If you do the exercises in the book, you will get in touch with reality and identify options for dealing with it.  Awe will take you by the shoulders and shake you awake and then heal you.  Add a dose of Lamott’s humour with a serving of stream-of-consciousness insight into the human heart and brain and you are away laughing.  Then get on the rollercoaster of human connections via friends and writers’ groups who read your drafts.  If you put your hands in the air and scream loud enough as you go through the loop-de-loop, you will breath a sigh of compassion and grace when you reach the end of the ride.  Lamott also tells you what your therapist and priest ought to tell you, but are too scared to because of what society might think.  The book is full of pithy wisdom from everyday life, local heroes, writers past and present.

There are anecdotes and nuggets of wisdom for anyone interested in living an authentic life as well. “Lighthouses don’t go running all over an island looking for boats to save; they just stand there, shining.”

Lamott is less concerned with teaching you to write well than she is with getting you to just write and understand why writing is important!  She promises that if you write you will become a better reader and a better person.  If you write you will start to pay attention and soften.  You will acknowledge and touch some of your deepest needs:  to be visible, to be heard, to make sense of your life, to wake up and grow and belong. Forget Matthieu Ricard, David Steindl-Rast, and Eckhart Tolle — she may just be the only guru you ever need. The author is a friend to herself, and if you pay attention you will find she teaches the rest of us how to befriend ourselves too.

The Bad

The by-line for Bird by Bird is: Some Instructions on Writing and Life.  It’s important to know what this book is not…

It is not a manual on learning to write.  If you want a list of drills on how to use adjectives, or tricks for making time move or stand still, or an agenda for running a writer’s group, step-by-step instructions on how to get published, or what you need to include in a good how-to book, you will be disappointed.  You will also be disappointed if you are looking for tips and criteria for producing great non-fiction.  Lamott’s focus is on writing fiction.  Good fiction for her is about seeking truth by telling lies every step of the way.  “It’s a lie if you make something up.  But you make it up in the name of the truth , and then you give your heart to expressing it clearly.” I also love that she says “You don’t always have to chop with the sword of truth.  You can point with it, too.”

If your primary goal it to get published, this book is probably not for you either.  Lamott does talk about getting published, but more in terms of the motivation for doing so and the sensations when it happens.  She sees it as one of the lesser by-products of writing. You might remark that this is easy to say for someone who is already published.  She will tell you that is is precisely because she is published that she is most qualified to say so.

It is a book about the process of writing, and the experience of it.  She lets you into the head and heart of wannabe and professional writers.  She does this in a humorous, ironic and, at times, exaggerated way.  This can become annoying for some readers who are not as paranoid and self-critical as she or I.  It might also be off-putting for people who are only just starting out on the writing journey.

The book reads like a story – the story of Anne Lamott’s personal forays into the writing badlands as well as the writing classes she teaches.  The table of contents acts like a course outline.  Because there is no index of exercises, you will have to read through each chapter to find the practices that will help you weather the storms that batter every writer of fiction and non-fiction alike.

For reference sake, here is a list of some of her exercises that might tickle your fancy but that you will have to read through the whole book to find:

The How To

Short assignments are the mainstay of Lamott’s approach to writing, and the backstory to the book’s title.  She will come back to them over and over again throughout the book.  They are her antidote to overwhelm and the ship that will keep your writing afloat and heading somewhere.

Actually, this review came together around a series of short assignments.  I was at sea and didn’t know where to begin because the book is complex and covers so much.  So I started with drafting my Instagram mini-reviews.  Each Instagram post functioned like the one-inch picture frame.  

The one-inch picture frame is something Lamott keeps on her desk to remind her that all she has to do is write down as much as she can see through it.  It’s a bit like that exercise that people sometimes do when learning to draw.  The teacher puts an empty frame around an object and tells the student to only draw what they see in the frame, or to draw the negative space between the frame and the object. So, you pick one small scene, one memory, or one exchange to write about.  And you take one thing at a time — bird by bird!

To emphasise her point, she quotes E.L.Doctorow as saying, “writing a novel is like driving a car at night.  You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

A short assignment is a short piece of writing, NOT a piece of writing that takes a short period of time to accomplish.  It’s important not to confuse the two.  The rest of the book is about all the subsequent work that goes into shaping that short piece into useful and satisfying writing.

You don’t have to have it all figured out from the start.  One short thing will lead to the next and suddenly you have what you were after even though you didn’t know what, exactly, that was to begin with.

Conclusion

I first read this book 22 years ago and got a lot out of it. I didn’t really get it, though, until I read it again now.  Lamott recognises that the craft of writing is not easy and she requires a lot of you!  A certain amount of life experience along with a willingness to look yourself squarely in the eye and delve into the hole in your heart is necessary.   Beware!  The humour, easy-going style and humanising stream-of-consciousness writing can lull you into a false sense of security. Bird by Bird is brimming with all kinds of practical ways to get writing.  Simplicity notwithstanding, they will exact everything of you if you do them sincerely.  They will also help you deal with the challenges that come with the writing life.