A review by ashyoung
Dirty Laundry: Why Adults with ADHD Are So Ashamed and What We Can Do to Help by Richard Pink, Roxanne Emery

5.0

Rating this 5 stars because I think it achieves exactly what it aims to: it is a book about someone's experience living with ADHD, someone without ADHD's experience being with them, and how tackling shame with compassion can go a long way to helping people with ADHD form healthier ways to manage and cope with the symptoms. 

I don't have a diagnosis but I related so heavily to so many things in this book. The directional dyslexia? That's me. Impulsive spending? Yep. Task avoidance? To the extreme. Difficulty cleaning my apartment? For sure. It was validating and also affirming to hear Rox talk about how she struggles with the symptoms of ADHD and what she's done to try and reduce their negative affects. And then hearing Rich discuss his journey from frustration to understanding, and how they then became a team dealing with these symptoms together, rather than working against each other, was so beautiful. 

I listened to the audiobook of this and highly recommend reading this book that way, as you get to hear Rox and Rich go back and forth reading the parts they wrote from their perspective and it feels like a conversation, really. AND I didn't have to speed the book up in order to be able to pay attention to it and not drift off!! 

If you're looking for scientific explanations and advice from psychologists and such, this isn't the right book for you. But if you want to read about someone's lived experience with ADHD, and the way they've gone about managing it, this is the book for you. I took away some great pointers from this for my own day to day, including the idea that I should apply the compassion both Rox and Rich talk about to my self talk and start being nicer to myself. People rarely flourish in negative conditions, so I don't know why I think I can succeed when I'm so negative towards myself.