Review: This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike, by Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs has lived enough life for several people, coming out the other side of child abuse, alcoholism, and the loss of a partner.  He has written several memoirs on these experiences, and in his newest work attempts to take the kowledge he has gained from these events and apply it towards an advisory bent.  This Is How focuses on giving advice on dealing with life's various problems.

Many of the sections of this book are well-written, and include direct references to personal experiences, although without in-depth explanations of the context of those references, which might be confusing to one who hasn't read his other works, or at the very least make the book less engaging.  His discussion on letting go of regret, and of the past, is particularly  plain-spoken and applicable to almost everyone.  It is Burrough's ability to make compelling metaphors, and put complex emotion into simple terms that make this work valuable in these areas.  Rather than creating a cumbersome self-help tome, Burroughs reframes concepts like letting go of the past by discussing the concern that by revisiting the past repeatedly, you are only getting your own distorted point of view; he does this using well-constructed metaphors and life stories that illuminate his ideas.  In these chapters, Burroughs is at his best.

However, in later chapters Burroughs allows his feeling of advisory ability to get away with him, and he writes on topics such as how to discuss terminal illness with a child, and how to deal with the death of a child, and in these areas he is much less skillful.  In fact, I found these sections to be fanciful at best, and completely offensive at worst.  As someone who has had a family child die (my wonderful nephew was killed in an accident five years ago), I found it presumptious of someone who has not had that experience to attempt to give others advice on how to handle it, and his example of a potential conversation with a dying child was utterly ridiculous.  People, if you don't have children, and you don't have a lot of experience with them, please don't tell parents how to talk to them, particularly on these topics.  It makes you sound pompous and foolish.  Truly, these later chapters feel as though Burroughs wasn't satisfied with the length of the book as it stood using his own personal material, and was looking for ways to stretch the book out.  They are far less sincere and personal than the others, and the writing suffers for it.

That aside, about 3/4 of 'How To...' is a decent read, with eloquent and thoughtful material.  We all have regrets, and shyness, and things in the past we'd rather move on from, and at this, Burroughs shines.  I may even go back through these areas and reread them from time to time.  He has taken the concept of living in the now and given it a conversational, bare-bones makeover that is appealing for the casual reader.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars.  A plainspoken, relatable advice book on various topics that would have received 4 or 4.5 stars without the pompous filler material near the end.