Four titles I'd written off the first time I read them in my twenties. All four, I found on re-reading, are better than I remember. Here's what I missed.
There is a particular kind of book that I spent my twenties being snotty about. Self-help, broadly. Relationship books, specifically. The ones with friendly cover designs and the therapist author photo on the back flap and the subtitle promising a framework I could use on Tuesday. I read a handful of them in my mid-twenties, on the recommendation of a therapist of my own, and I remember sneering at them with the particular superior sneer of someone who had recently read a Dostoevsky novel and was therefore convinced she knew what a serious book looked like.
I'm in my late thirties now. In the past year, I have re-read four of them, partly because my therapist suggested it and partly because I was curious what my younger self had missed. The results were embarrassing. Not because the books had changed, they hadn't, but because I, reading them a decade later, was finding in them things that were clearly there the first time and that I had been too defended, too literary, or too young to see.
This is the piece I wish someone had written for me at twenty-six. It's about four specific books that I now think were right and I was wrong.
The book I hated for being too organized
The first book is the one I gave the worst reviews to at twenty-six. I hated its structure. It had chapters with bullet points. It had exercises at the end of each section. It had the kind of relentless, helpful clarity that makes literary readers, or at least the literary reader I was, recoil, because it seemed to presume you were too stupid to find your own way through the material.
Reading it again at thirty-seven, I noticed something I had somehow missed the first time: the bullet points are not there for readers who can't parse prose. They are there so that the reader, at 11pm on a Tuesday, can find the specific point she was looking for without re-reading the whole chapter. This is a book designed for the reader it's actually written for, a tired adult who is trying to save her relationship and does not have three hours to re-read a twenty-page chapter to find the one paragraph she needed.
I had, at twenty-six, treated this as a stylistic failing. At thirty-seven, I recognized it as craft. The book was written to be useful, repeatedly, over years. Its design served that purpose. My literary snobbery had blinded me to an obvious virtue.
The book I hated for its framing
The second book, which I won't name out of fairness to the author, has a premise that I found, at twenty-six, almost offensively reductive. It argues that most relationship problems are a small number of specific problems in disguise, and that naming them correctly is most of what's required to begin solving them. I bounced off this within about forty pages.
Rereading it, slowly, in January, I realized I had misread it completely. The argument is not that you can solve your relationship by naming its dysfunction. The argument is much more modest: that naming is a first step, and without it nothing else works. You cannot address a pattern you refuse to see. You cannot repair a harm you will not name. The book's whole project is the preliminary work before the real work. This is not reductive. This is the honest difficulty of the first stage.
You cannot address a pattern you refuse to see. You cannot repair a harm you will not name. The book's project is the preliminary work before the real work.
I needed, at twenty-six, to believe that naming things was easy. The book was telling me it wasn't. I was not ready to hear it.
The book I hated for its optimism
The third book is, in its way, the most generous one on the list. It argues, against most of the evidence of contemporary culture, that long-term partnership is both possible and meaningful, and that the conditions for it are not a mysterious alchemy but a set of learnable skills and dispositions. The book assembles a substantial amount of research, a handful of case studies, and a clear, patient theory of what makes partnerships last.
I found this, at twenty-six, intolerably upbeat. I was going through a breakup. I did not want to be told that long-term partnership was learnable. I wanted to be told that love was a storm and some storms pass and the survivors are made stronger or whatever, and this book was being methodical at me, and I resented it.
At thirty-seven, I can see that the book was doing me an enormous kindness. It was refusing to participate in my self-pity. It was offering me, instead, a framework I could use. That it was written with the optimism I found insufferable was, in retrospect, a feature rather than a bug. Pessimism about relationships is cheap and easy and ubiquitous. Optimism grounded in evidence is rare. The book's tone was the right tone. I just couldn't hear it yet.
All five books should be available at your local library first, which is where I find most of the ones I recommend. For anyone without library access, Bookshop.org supports independent bookstores and carries all five titles. The American Psychological Association's relationship psychology reading list is worth a scan for anyone wanting more academic treatments in adjacent territory. For my own views on what these books get right and where they oversimplify, see Love Languages, As Explained By Someone Who Reread the Book.
The book I hated for not being a memoir
The fourth one is the one I find hardest to explain. It's a book on attachment theory, clinical in tone, dry in register, written in the voice of someone who has read a lot of research. I bounced off it at twenty-six because I wanted, specifically, a memoir, someone's life story shaped into insight, and this book refused to provide one.
What I've come to appreciate, on re-reading, is precisely the thing I wanted it not to be. A memoir gives you one life's worth of evidence. The attachment book gives you the distilled evidence of many lives, carefully filtered through decades of research. You can argue with a memoir. You cannot argue as easily with a framework grounded in research, and not being able to argue with it is, it turns out, what I needed. The book was patient with me. It did not flatter me with a single protagonist I could identify with. It handed me a framework and said, essentially, use this if you want to use it, or don't.
At thirty-seven I want this in a book. I did not at twenty-six. This is, if I'm honest, the single biggest change in my reading life between my twenties and my late thirties. I now prefer a book that hands me a tool to a book that hands me a story. Memoirs used to feel essential. They now feel slightly beside the point.
What I think was going on
The honest version of this piece is: I was not reading these books wrongly at twenty-six. I was reading them as a twenty-six-year-old. A twenty-six-year-old, or at least the one I was, has a particular set of needs from a book. She wants the book to prove its literary seriousness before she'll trust it. She wants to be flattered as a reader. She wants a voice, a sensibility, a writer she can argue with in her head. Books that do not provide these things, and provide instead a framework, a practice, a set of exercises, feel to her like a lesser form.
They are not a lesser form. They are a different form. The twenty-six-year-old was not wrong to prefer the one; she was wrong to think the other was inferior. I have, at thirty-seven, come to understand this. I wish I had understood it earlier.
If you are in your twenties and you hate these books: that's okay. You may love them at thirty-seven. Or you may not. What I'd ask is that you not write them off in your twenties in a way that prevents you from picking them up again later. The books will still be there. You will be different. The reading will, possibly, repay you.