Best ADHD book I've read yet because of its simplicity and practicality. How many books have you read that tell you "get an agenda, use post-it notes, set alarms," which leaves you with one more thing to do and a constant reminder of your overwhelm and deficits. Just me?

Jenna Free strips our actions down to regulation, and the neurodivergent's tendency to fall into disregulation. The world wasn't but for neurodiverse brains, which layers a lot of anxiety and shame into the way we think about ourselves. Learning how, and committing to, keeping yourself regulated is the comfort zone from where we can make better informed decisions.

Alongside colourful pages and charming illustrations, Free gives us just enough information to feel confident in our ability to approach ADHD, not to change, but to listen to ourselves.

Highly recommended.

I love the idea of a memoir of a heartbreak, and thank God Annie wrote one with unflinching honesty, even when it depicts her in an unflattering light. But I think that's the core of the book's charm: the lack of moralization, the acceptance that the nasty bits are just as much a part of Annie as the bold, brave decisions she makes.

There is a section near the end where Annie talks to a cab driver about her breakup, to which he replies that if her boyfriend had stayed, he wouldn't be him. Our potential isn't us, especially when it comes from someone else.

The last memoir I read, Anon by Caia Hagel, has the author musing about AI's ability to create an extended version of ourselves through its hallucinations. Instead of brushing these hallucinations off as nonfactual data (Hagel's AI spit out a number of books and projects Hagel created in describing her, but all were nonexistent), Hagel is starry-eyed about the possibility that AI might know the depths of our potential better than we do ourselves. This fractured sense of self between what exists and what could be feels like most difficult part of a breakup to accept. The what-ifs. If we could be different people, would it have worked?

What makes us who we are is our thoughts, our actions, not what others (human or otherwise) think of us, and living up to encompass the latter can be a devastating role to play. Annie admits she believed Joe had a greater potential than the life he was living, and eventually Joe's refusal to mould himself into Annie's "Potential Joe" leads to the break-up.

In a relationship like Annie's described, one so completely enmeshed that the otherness of your partner fades into an extension of self, when a break-up happens you don't just lose the other, you lose yourself. You have to learn again what it means to be you, to reclaim these fractured pieces into something signifying your "you-ness." It's an ownership over oneself that I think Annie illustrates well throughout the book; learning to let go of the potential of others in order to live in a reality that she can truly affect.

This book is like your best girl friend relating to your breakup pain by sharing her own. You'll both still be heartbroken, but you'll be seen for you. To each other you give a fragment of a broken mirror so you can see your face reflected back in its entirety, different but whole.

The quiet horror of the mundane and the comfort of predictability are measured out with tact and precision. I am looking forward to reading the next volume.

I ended up liking this much more than I thought based on others' reviews. The tone and writing style felt too rigid for me at the beginning and Baxter too much of a character to feel full and real (Black, gay porter with a heart of gold that's saving up for dental school felt a little too theatric for the setting and pace). But somewhere along the line I looked forward to picking this book up and reading and found myself settled into the pacing and tone, happily along for the ride.