Why this book exists
A focused place to understand what is happening
There is a sentence that people say to each other at Christmas now, cheerfully, in living rooms, in front of the whole family, and it is one of the more consequential sentences of our era and nobody has noticed. Go on, spit in it. I have sat with a number of people over the last few years who did, and they are not all women, and the thing they have in common is that not one of them thought about it for more than about nine seconds beforehand. It was forty pounds. It was advertised between the programmes, with music. It was going to say where you are from, with a map, and percentages, and a pleasant feeling. It does not do that. Or rather, it does that, and then it does the other thing, which is not in the advertisement.
The writing is designed to reduce shame, bring the underlying pattern into view and give you practical ways to respond without pretending that every life follows the same formula.
