The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions Into My Best Life, by Lauren Martin (library hardback)
I want to talk in-depth about this because it’s the first book I’ve picked up in a long, long time that was meant to help me deal with mental and emotional stuff rather than distract me from it.
And it was disappointing in specific ways that meant more than just a bad read.
I have borderline personality disorder. Unlike the bunny boiling reputation it gets online and in other media, in real life a big part of BPD means my emotional responses are permanently set to 11, and I’m ill-equipped to deal with that naturally. I have to work to both soothe and accommodate my moods so they don’t burn me out completely and/or destroy my relationships with people I like.
It’s exhausting (like all mental illnesses), and I’ll have to deal with it for the rest of my life. My therapist is awesome at helping me learn how to calm myself, and since we talk a lot about moods and what they mean and all that jazz, I figured this might be a good start to my reluctant foray into the self-help section of my library.
Unfortunately, this book is not boosting my confidence in that genre.
Here are some red flags that I chose to ignore amongst the trendy (and okay fine, very aesthetically pleasing) pinks and oranges of the cover:
This is not by a mental health professional. Martin has dealt with depression and anxiety for most of her young adult life, which, fine. I’m all for hearing about other people’s experiences in this because it helps me put my own into context and remember I’m not alone in the struggle. However, Martin’s whole shtick here is that she’s giving advice. Like that’s the whole point of the book, and not just a byproduct of her life story. Which gives her more of an air of authority than she deserves.
She doesn’t have a reference section. Y’all don’t know how much energy I’m putting into not capitalizing this whole paragraph about how Martin DOES NOT USE CITATIONS FOR THE STUDIES SHE TALKS ABOUT TO BACK UP HER OWN CONCLUSIONS. Sorry, slipped a bit there. To her credit, she does pepper her own experiences with specific names and headlines instead of the even more irresponsibly vague “studies say.” Five points to Gryffindor for that one. But then I’m taking away ten because she never gives full citations so you can’t go to them for further verification, and as a Library Professional (tm) and someone who gets paid to do research (hey, go listen to Swindled podcast, I help that guy find and organize facts for his episodes), this is INFURIATING. As well as an excellent excuse to side-eye like all the things her book is spouting as Science.
These aren’t really even moods? Flipping through her table of contents, I noticed that she organized her chapters by type of mood. That seemed logical, until I saw that these “moods” were stuff like “beauty” and “past and future” and “the body” and “work” and “friends” and “family” and my brain just went ??? Those aren’t moods? I can’t help but keeping at least one question mark there because within the chapters she goes on to describe actual moods that relate to beauty standards, or stress at work, or dealing with passive-aggressive family members. Okay. So I get what she’s going for but it’s just poorly executed. It’d be so easy to call the chapters like MOOD: Work Stress, or MOOD: Family Guilt. MOOD: Nostalgia vs. Anxiety. MOOD: Biological Pain. MOOD: Social Anxiety. FIFY, Martin.
It’s for all the Ladiez out there. Lordt. When I saw that a whole chapter was devoted to how to tame your inner period bitch, my eyes basically fell out of my head from rolling so hard. And it’s not because I don’t think people who have periods aren’t affected by them. We are. It hurts as bad as having a heart attack. Our hormones cycle around trying to get us to reproduce. We have to deal with that. But you know who else has to deal with biological factors affecting their mood? EVERYONE ON THE PLANET. If you want to come at me about hormones, folks with more testosterone have to deal with fallout from that, which isn’t discussed nearly as much as a systematic problem.
She’s got something to sell. While Martin was writing this book, she started a website that seems to be a sort of collaborative women’s space. It’s got soft-pop-psych articles about being a woman, and essays about personal experiences, and media critics, and stuff like that. My favorite part is the section that curates different movies, TV shows, and books to give you descriptions and where to watch/buy/read them. Coolio. But Martin is listed as its CEO, and I want you to remember that she’s got a book to sell, posts to get eyeballs on, and social media impressions to make to keep herself afloat. This advice is not meant to be free, even if you checked it out of the library (hi guys!).
So here’s why I felt off after reading:
Martin frames emotional regulation as women’s work.
By discussing these specific times when we feel something negative as if we’re always the ones in the way, Martin is perpetuating the harmful societal narrative that women are the more “emotional” (read: useless, helpless) gender.*
Women still have to fight this stereotype and more often than not lose to it anyway because the only way we can make some people listen is to get angry, and then the other side can point to that as proof that we’re naturally more hysterical, when really we’re just super fucking sick of nobody listening to a goddamn word we say.
We should be listening to our anger, disappointment, sadness, fear, anxiety, etc. and trying to hear what they’re really telling us instead of trying to learn techniques that let us push them down into boxes that other people made for us.
*I’m deliberately using the word gender here because I’m referring to the societal constructs.
Martin uses her own experiences as if they’re universal.
Her chapters presume that everyone thinks their work is stressful, everyone wants to stay reconciled with family, everyone just needs to tell themselves that we’re all like, really pretty, basically that everyone has her same type of cis-het-white woman reactions to the shit that gets us down.
This not only ignores but trivializes and dismisses other folk’s experiences. And Martin, while not a multimillionaire with live-in servants, still does not acknowledge the help and good luck that makes it so much easier for her to pull herself up out of her bad moods than someone who doesn’t have a live-in partner with a well-paying job and stable sense of self; higher education; and the free time to build a website, make it profitable, and scrounge a book from it.
She makes a few good points, but they are about things that are glancing and shallow and that the vast majority of people I know have to ignore because deeper parts of their lives are currently on fire and they have to figure out how to put those out first.
And she doubles down on the hard-earned advice shtick even after plastering a disclaimer under the cover about not being a mental health professional, which is even more infuriating when you realize that she wrote all this between the ages of 25 and 30. Nobody has useful advice in their late twenties, everybody’s panicking about not knowing basic shit and not having any money to deal with that.
Why Should I Care?
This book is concerning in the same way Girl, Wash Your Face is. It’s advertised as something to help yourself get out of your funk, and if this doesn’t work, it doesn’t present alternatives so you’re probably just broken for life, sorry.
It’s also a lot cheaper than therapy, so I’m worried that women will pick it up, not connect to any of it, and then just give up trying to figure out what their feelings are telling them.
Also, remember how a big part of Girl, Wash Your Face and Rachael Hollis’s business is based on the awesome relationship she has with her husband and how you, too, can share in that awesomeness for the low, low price of thousands of US dollars? Yeah, they got divorced last summer, apparently putting on the ol’ show face to eke out a few more conferences before having to drop the news that they’ve been faking it for a while now.
P.S. I watched these great videos of therapist Mickey Atkins reacting to the evangelical Christian brand Girl Defined’s podcast, which helped me articulate a lot of why Martin’s book didn’t sit right. Martin doesn’t bring religion into anything, which is great, but she does peddle a softer-edged version of toxic positivity that is the same type of unhelpful.