Eat, Read, and Be Mommy

I was looking for something quick to listen to last weekend and, while browsing ‘available audiobooks’, came up with Cait Flanders The Year of Less: How I Stopped Shopping, Gave Away My Belongings, and Discovered Life is Worth More Than Anything You Can Buy in a Store. Since memoirs appeal to me I went with it, and I have to say–it was both interesting and enjoyable. Flanders is incredibly open about her past issues with alcoholism, debt, and compulsive shopping, and her experiences overcoming those issues leave you with a feeling of ‘people can do hard things’ that is motivational without being overwhelming.

And then I looked through some of the Goodreads reviews. What the heck, people? This book is exactly what it purports to be, and given the length of the subtitle, readers ought to know exactly what that is. Cait Flanders strikes me as someone who acknowledges her struggles and has made great strides in taking control of her life, and yet readers are calling her a whiny millenial. Why can’t we read about someone else’s experiences without name-calling? Why do people feel like being mean is somehow a valid book review? And why–why on EARTH–do people give a book a low rating for being EXACTLY WHAT IT SAYS IT IS? If you wanted it to be something else, people–and I got the impression that the complainers wanted it to be a sort of cross between The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up and a modern Thoreau-ish memoir–that’s on you. Cait Flanders wrote an engaging memoir about her own experiences and I found it to be a completely worthwhile listening experience. The back and forth in time could possibly have been easier to follow (to be fair, that’s often worse in audio) and telling readers nothing about WHY her parents divorced, while laudable, did leave me feeling like something important was missing from that part of her story, but neither of those things were deal-breakers. If Flanders’ book sounds interesting to you, you’ll likely enjoy it–so go ahead and ignore the mean people on Goodreads. Your time will be better spent with Flanders.