This Messy Magnificent Life:

This Messy Magnificent Life: A Field Guide by Geneen Roth      Audio Book:  4 hours, 19 mins.    Hardback Book:  223 pages                 

The first ¾ of this book was like delving into someone’s inner thoughts who is so totally depressed you can feel their despair.   It was really hard for me to wade through most of this book, because all I could get out of it was how burnt out the writer seemed to be.   It’s like she is spent, she has told these stories so often now, she can’t work up any real compassion to continue giving of herself.    It definitely comes across she is needy and requiring her therapist’s help more at this point in her life.    Everything she says during the first part of the book seems like verbal vomiting.    She is regurgitating things she has said so often that she is tired of hearing herself say them.    To be fair she tells a lot of stories about people she has helped over the years, she talks about her own  past and how horrible her life was at home and the things she has tried over the years to heal the hurt that doesn’t go away, so, it is understandable when you come to the last quarter of the book maybe where she was going or at least where her summations arrive in the later chapters.    The last quarter of the book make up for the incredibly depressing first three quarters but it honestly was a big struggle to get there.   I kept on with her story because I knew there had to be a point to it, and, I was determined to push on to find it.   If you have ever watched a film that is so bad you want to turn it off or leave the theater but, feel committed to try to seek something worthwhile in it that was my feeling with this book.    I felt like I was listening to someone who has overmedicated themselves go on and on talking covering many topics but not really making a point from any of the talking they are doing.    I was glad to get to the summation (at last) and honestly she brings up a lot of good things throughout, it is just that you feel like you want to say, “and then?” but by that time she has drifted off sort of leaving the thought dangling in space or she completely moves on to another topic entirely not completing that train of thought either before drifting off again.   Like I said the first three quarters of this book was agony to get through for me, it was like a rehash of something she had said before and she was so bored from talking about it so often or else she was so out of it that she couldn’t keep on topic herself.   Clarity won out in the last quarter and it is as if she had a strong cup of coffee and began to speak clearer and stayed the course to the end.   I wouldn’t recommend this one, personally.