Jan 24

Jan 24 A Handful of Books for Seeking Connection

Maybe it’s a contradiction to look to books when we’re looking for more connection in our lives. But as introverts, we’ve found that sometimes the books we turn to provide exactly the kind of company that we need.

We’ve pulled together some recent reads that have helped shape our perspective on this idea of connection. We’ve included non-fiction by Vivek Murthy, Priya Parker, and Johann Hari that explore the science of relationships, helping us realize why people matter as much as they do, how why we gather has impacts beyond the moment of coming together, and why who shows up in our lives can shape our experience of it.

And there’s fiction too by Sally Rooney and Bernardine Evaristo that reveal the breadth and nuance of different kinds of relationships as well as allowing us an intimacy with the characters playing out their imaginary worlds. Others are memoirs like those by Michelle Obama and Bill Hayes that give us glimpses of lives that have prioritized service to and curiosity about the people with whom we share our neighborhoods.

We hope you’ll discover some new finds, some new ways to friendship, and maybe even some new relationships, imaginary or real.

Featured

READ | TOGETHER

The book that makes the argument that being together matters, launched ironically at the beginning of a pandemic that found us locked in our homes and crossing streets to avoid one another. This fascinating book by former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy (now on Biden’s Coronavirus Task Force) had us thinking about how human contact affects human health, connecting loneliness to such things as substance abuse, violence, and depression as well as productivity, childhood wellbeing, and political division. With insights from his own life and advice to shift your own more towards connection, this book shows the science behind the wisdom of being better together.

“The truth is that we are not self-sufficient. We evolved to be interdependent beings.” — Dr. Vivek Murthy

READ | THE ART OF GATHERING: HOW WE MEET AND WHY IT MATTERS

In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker has taken on an issue at the heart of If Lost Start Here, and at the heart of many of our lives: in what ways do we come together and why does it even matter. Parker makes the argument that we’re losing the art of presence, that when we come together we’re fumbling for connection, meaning, and relevance. We follow templates for gatherings that might not serve us anymore (case in point those Monday morning team meetings you’ve learned to loathe) and that we don’t ourselves fully show up to (maybe the same case in point). We might even be the ones hosting those meetings/ badly formed parties/yawning social events.

There’s a science and an art to bringing people together well, and Parker shares her experiences and best practices across vastly different circumstances from White House meetings, focus groups, and professional conferences, through to engagement announcements, funerals, and even retirement communities. Parker talks about how we can do it better. It’s a little like a modern etiquette guide, but our needs for being savvier about how we form community and grow connections now go way beyond throwing a decent dinner party. Parker’s wisdom applies to any moment people come together, and she makes a convincing case for why it’s still important that we do that. Our major takeaway is that when we host, we really need to host. Also maybe we shouldn’t sit next to our partners at social events.

“The way we gather matters. Gatherings consume our days and help determine the kind of world we love in, in both intimate and public realms. Gatherings—the conscious bringing together of people for a reason—shapes the way we think, feel, and make sense of our world.” — Priya Parker

READ | LOST CONNECTIONS: WHY YOU'RE DEPRESSED AND HOW TO FIND HOPE

A stunning book that turns on its head everything we, and author Johann Hari, thought we knew about why we become depressed and what to do about it when we do. This book follows Hari’s own journey (literally over 40,000 miles seeking experts across the world) trying to seek an understanding of his own experiences of depression and why treatments based solely on long-term medications (he took his first anti-depressant aged 18 and was on the maximum legal dose into his 13th year on them) weren’t the solutions that he believed them to be and aren’t for the majority of us (he doesn’t dispute that they help the minority of people who take them). Through identifying the connections that we’ve lost — to nature, to our work, to a set of values, to each other, even to the realities of our lives amongst these – he manages to identify a new path forward. Now an international bestseller, Lost Connections offers a totally different foundational approach to our emotional wellbeing. Pair with Hari’s Ted Talk on hHari’s Ted Talk is book.

“What if depression is, in fact, a form of grief—for our own lives not being as they should? What if it is a form of grief for the connections we have lost, yet still need?” — Johann Hari

READ | THE LONELY CITY: ADVENTURES IN THE ART OF BEING ALONE

This is a book of intimacy, even though it’s the story of loneliness, of how Olivia Laing found herself alone in New York City in her thirties. Despite the shame that can come with loneliness, Laing finds ways to be curious about what it means, and how what can also serve to isolate us (like depression and anxiety) can also bring us back to each other. She turns over loneliness’s history, its effects on those who feel it, how it shows up now — studies show that more than a quarter of Americans struggle with loneliness and 45% of Brits say they are lonely often or sometimes — and how as a society we’re often complicit in rejecting those who need us the most.

Sensing its redemptive qualities, Laing brings in the company of NYC’s artists – Andy Warhol, Edward Hopper, and David Wojnarowicz — those who have similarly lived on life’s edges and restores her own sense of self through handling their stories and their works.

For anyone who has felt the tug of loneliness in a city buzzing with others, who has similarly watched at windows while others lived full lives, Laing offers her words of connection and clues to something more.

“When I came to New York I was in pieces, and though it sounds perverse, the way I recovered a sense of wholeness was not by meeting someone or by falling in love, but rather by handling the things that other people had made, slowly absorbing by way of this contact the fact that loneliness, longing, does not mean one has failed, but simply that one is alive.” — Olivia Laing

READ | GIRL, WOMAN, OTHER

Co-winner of the Booker prize (and the first Black woman to win it) with Margaret Atwood’s Testaments in 2019, many, many other literary prizes and singled out by both Barack Obama and Roxane Gay, in Girl, Woman, Other Bernardine Evaristo puts ‘presence into absence’. Telling the stories of twelve black female and non-binary characters, connected across centuries, the Anglo-Nigerian author has spoken about writing ‘as many black female protagonists as I could get away with’, consciously bringing them together from different moments in Britain’s colonial history, different locations around the UK (including a farm in Northern England), and from different understandings of their gender, ancestry or situation.

Written in stunning prose poetry which pulls readers towards it, the book reveals how these characters are connected across their stories. This is a book that sits in empathy: each experience reveals different lived experiences inflected with intersecting issues around class, patriarchy, sexuality, social inequality, prejudice, trauma, and religion. Each of the narratives includes moments we can relate to when characters get stuck in their confusion, our hurt, history’s injustices. There are moments of clarity, connection and ultimately togetherness throughout that reveal a story of modern Britain that hasn’t previously been told.

“this is not about feeling something or about speaking words

this is about being

together.” — Bernardine Evaristo

READ | CONVERSATIONS WITH FRIENDS

Sally Rooney’s stunning debut novel feels like it’s keeping itself in check while trying not to fall into the intimacy abyss of female friendship and love relationships. Frances, a millennial beholden only to herself, but who is really in thrall to the self-possessed Bobbi and confusingly charming Nick, works at figuring it all out with a cool detachment that she certainly doesn’t feel. People, they are complicated. It will make you question why you think what you think about people, and how your ego sometimes needs to slide right out of the way.

“Things and people moved around me, taking positions in obscure hierarchies, participating in systems I didn’t know about and never would. A complex network of objects and concepts. You live through certain things before you understand them. You can’t always take the analytical position.” — Sally Rooney

READ | THE HOUSEKEEPER AND THE PROFESSOR

We find ways to connect where we can. In this subtly unfolding novel by Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa a family of sorts is formed between a mathematician whose memory extends to only 80-minutes, the housekeeper assigned to look after him by his surly sister-in-law, and her son, a 10-year-old nicknamed Root by the Professor for the shape of his head. The tenderness between them lies not in shared experiences, but in an expansive, poetic, and awe-inspiring view of mathematics which becomes the language that bounds them. The Professor communicates through numbers, and the beauty he sees in them becomes the thread that holds everything together. As with a simple number sequence, almost nothing happens, but this sequence contains, and is foundational, to everything of meaning. A subtle book that stays with you.

“Solving a problem for which you know there’s an answer is like climbing a mountain with a guide, along a trail someone else has laid. In mathematics, the truth is somewhere out there in a place no one knows, beyond all the beaten paths. And it’s not always at the top of the mountain. It might be in a crack on the smoothest cliff or somewhere deep in the valley.” — Ogawa

READ | INSOMNIAC CITY: NEW YORK, OLIVER, AND ME

We fell in love with the writings of Oliver Sacks a long time ago, but this book – written by Bill Hayes his partner in the last years of his life – made us fall in love with the man: his curiosity, his joy of life, his out of time-ness. Though as much as it’s about falling and being in love (and losing) one man, it’s also about a romantic entanglement with New York and the people who live there. Hayes fills these pages with the encounters that fill his days and nights – with shopkeeper Ali, with a person who needs help on the subway, with a homeless man who shares a poem. If you’re open to the world, to exposing yourself to its vulnerabilities, you also expose yourself to some of its most fascinating stories. A book to break your heart, and bring you back to life.

“The same cannot be said about aliveness, of which there are countless degrees. One can be alive but half-asleep or half-noticing as the years fly, no matter how fully oxygenated the blood and brain or how steadily the heart beats. Fortunately, this is a reversible condition. One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause—to memorize moments of the everyday.” — Bill Hayes

READ | BECOMING

Yes, we do have a serious girl crush on Michelle Obama after reading Becoming (ok it was there before reading this!) but we’re citing this for Culture Therapy because at the heart of the former First Lady’s career, maybe even her life, has been this idea of connection. Rooted deeply into her family ties with the Southside, while reaching out to people from all backgrounds during her time at the White House (through her focus on kids, health, and the military), Obama’s approach is a testament to the importance of bringing people together. One of the most inspiring books we’re read in a while and though it feels now like everyone has read it, if you haven’t, we recommend you do.

“In sharing my story, I hope to help create space for other stories and other voices, to widen the pathway for who belongs and why. I’ve been lucky enough to get to walk into stone castles, urban classrooms, and Iowa kitchens, just trying to be myself, just trying to connect. For every door that’s been opened to me, I’ve tried to open my door to others. And here is what I have to say, finally: Let’s invite one another in. Maybe then we can begin to fear less, to make fewer wrong assumptions, to let go of the biases and stereotypes that unnecessarily divide us. Maybe we can better embrace the ways we are the same. It’s not about being perfect. It’s not about where you get yourself in the end. There’s power in allowing yourself to be known and heard, in owning your unique story, in using your authentic voice. And there’s grace in being willing to know and hear others. This, for me, is how we become.” — Michelle Obama

READ | EDUCATED

Repeatedly on Best of Lists, Tara Westover’s memoir has stunned people with its true tale of a seventeen-year-old Westover entering a classroom for the first time after growing up in a survivalist family in the mountains of Idaho. Though a deeply personal and moving account of one person’s struggle to navigate the reality of their own life, the universals of family, home, and courage speak to all of us.

“Everything I had worked for, all my years of study, had been to purchase for myself this one privilege: to see and experience more truths than those given to me by my father, and to use those truths to construct my own mind. I had come to believe that the ability to evaluate many ideas, many histories, many points of view, was at the heart of what it means to self-create. If I yielded now, I would lose more than an argument. I would lose custody of my own mind. This was the price I was being asked to pay, I understood that now. What my father wanted to cast from me wasn’t a demon: it was me.” — Tara Westover

READ | THIS WILL BE MY UNDOING

This book blew us away. It’s courageous and open and raw and brave. It unsettles, and challenges, and moves, and awakens. Morgan Jenkins gives voice to her experiences of being a black woman growing up and living in today’s America. She talks openly in a series of essays about her experiences in contexts such as cheerleading, Ivy League college, and international travel, her take on figures such as Michelle Obama and Beyonce, the politics of black women’s hair, and how to have and sustain relationships, within ideas of identity politics and personal beliefs.

“We cannot come together if we do not recognize our differences first. These differences are best articulated when women of color occupy the center of the discourse while white women remain silent, actively listen, and do not try to reinforce supremacy by inserting themselves in the middle of the discussion.” — Morgan Jenkins

As our understanding of the importance of connection increases, so too do the number of great books on the subject, particularly in terms of its effects on our mental and emotional wellbeing. We’ve included just a handful here, but there are others that we’re hoping to get to in the coming weeks that we’ve included in our Bookshop. Our Connection Edit includes books that we’ll talk about here soon, as well as others recommended to us that are on our reading lists. We hope browsing these shelves you’ll find one or two to help bring more connection and locate more community in your own life.

BROWSE OUR BOOKSHOP SHELVES

We’re always on the lookout for more Culture Therapy ideas, those books, podcasts, TV shows, films, artists, music, and magazines to seek out when we’re searching for something to inspire, support, and soothe. Let us know what you love and help us find more ways to navigate this complicated world of ours.

Tell us your Culture Therapy Prescription