A review by vsgayatri
The Examined Life: How We Lose and Find Ourselves by Stephen Grosz

4.0

Reading this book makes you feel like a child again. The stories told here don't feel like they happened to real people, mostly adults like oneself. It may be because of how brief and 'complete' they are - person has problem, person and analyst discussing things for a while, a memory resurfaces, the problem is restated in light of that memory, they work on it, short thoughtful abstraction of the contents of the essay. The complexities of people and trying to analyze them don't really shine through, so you feel like child whose parents are telling them a moralistic fairy tale, where you get the short version with a lesson at the end. The author makes a valiant attempt to dive into and explain the cases he worked on, and with a measure of success - I was left introspective, which is a good thing in my opinion - but it also becomes obvious that humans are complex creatures and that no book, especially one of this length, can really examine our short eventful lives.

That being said, reading this book was quite the experience. I plan to reread :D