A review by bluejayreads
Raising Hell, Living Well: Freedom from Influence in a World Where Everyone Wants Something from You by Jessica Elefante

Did not finish book. Stopped at 41%.

This is yet another book where the title really called to me conceptually. I would like to raise hell and live well. I would just as much like to get out from under the influence of all the various things trying to manipulate me for commercial and other purposes. I also found the author's Folk Rebellion blog and thought it was really cool, but unfortunately I found it after she stopped writing it so reading this was as much a way to make up for not being able to subscribe to the blog than anything. 

I did have a few reservations going in. Mainly because, in trying to find out what was going on with the Folk Rebellion blog, I ended up on Jessica's Twitter account, and she’d posted a couple things that sounded a little eco-fascist to me (”what if we are the invasive species” is the one I wrote down, and I refuse to make a Twitter account just to look at the tweets again). So I picked it up with some reservations, but I was still willing to give it a chance. 

As you already know, I did not finish this book. But that had nothing to do with eco-fascist leanings. In fact, I could tell fairly early that I wasn't liking it, but I kept reading for a bit because I just couldn't figure out why. I still don't think I've quite identified all the reasons this book made me a little uneasy, but I at least have enough to write a review around. 

First, this book is allegedly about how to break free from the influence of all the various forces in the modern world trying to manipulate you, but Jessica spends the vast majority of this book talking in vivid detail about all the ways we're being influenced and very little about what you can actually do about it. Each chapter ends with a little “folktale, folklore, folk rebellion” section that lists the manipulative message, what society says about it, and what you should think instead, respectively. There's also a short paragraph labeled “Raise Hell” that contains the entirety of the actual advice in this book. But the raise hell part is almost exclusively advice along the lines of, “actually you can think about this differently” or “have you considered not wanting the thing you've been conditioned since birth to want.” None of it's actionable, very little of it is helpful, and if you're the kind of person who would be interested in a book like this, it's largely stuff you've read or thought of on your own previously. And I can't stress enough that for the first 154 pages, that's all there is about actually raising hell or living well. 

The second thing that really annoyed me about this book was how much of it came off as a humble-brag on Jessica's part. She's coming at this topic as a converted expert - she spent most of her career expertly welding the ability to influence people in various ways until she saw the light about how bad it was and now she's the guru who left a promising career of wealth and success behind to teach you how to break free of influence and manipulation. Which can be a really compelling approach. And it probably would have been a really compelling approach if Jessica could stop making her past sound so damn cool. From her time traveling the country to her stint as a sexy bartender to how excessively successful she was at her career, Jessica made her whole life sound really cool and awesome, and didn't quite succeed at convincing me …. actually, I'm not entirely sure what all these anecdotes from her past were trying to convince me of, actually. Maybe that influence is everywhere? The main ideas that I got were 1) influence is being applied all over the place for various purposes, and 2) Jessica herself is (or at least used to be) unbelievably cool. 

I think the book is supposed to be about resisting influence, but that idea got lost in long, rambling anecdotes with too many irrelevant details. It did a reasonable job making the point that influence is everywhere, but it didn’t do a great job convincing me that this is a bad thing or that I need to learn to resist all influence. I’m not actually sure what the point of this book is. (At least, not beyond convincing me how cool Jessica used to be.) I didn’t pick up this book certain that influence was always a bad thing that I should strive to be free of in all circumstances, and this book definitely did not convince me of that, either. The idea I mostly got is that Jessica gave up a great career and a life of doing awesome stuff to be a mother and whatever it is she actually does now and this book is largely an attempt to prove that she did cool stuff in the past and she’s not nearly as lame as she feels now. Of course, I could very well be reading way too much into this, too. But either way, the title over-promised and the book delivered less information than I’d hoped.