Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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Some treasures added to my existing understanding; as a post-war child, I have read widely about World War II and the Holocaust. Accustomed to dull chores in a childless household and hosting her husband’s wearisome business clients for dinner, Sarah suddenly finds herself questioning everything she thought she knew, as her investigation reveals that people long believed dead are still among the living, while the living are fast joining the dead. We welcome national treasure Michael Rosen onto the podcast this week to share some beautiful, witty and thoughtful reflections from his new memoir, Getting Better. Her teenage mother abandons her in the first few weeks of her life, and left in the 'care' of her father, she ends up lying deserted in a house with no food, no water, no clothes and no warmth.

This rich and varied anthology contains the radio productions of five of Lawrence's classic novels, and nine short stories and novellas. Because there is this extraordinary thing, we've seen various people on television saying things like, well, I don't know anybody who suffered from Covid, so, I don't believe in it. He explores the full range of definitions of ‘getting better’ and gives some really practical tips for motivating yourself.And I thought, well, I'll turn the little words, the little collection ragbag of words and phrases that I know into a way of speaking it. On a clear spring day in 1995, five members of a religious cult unleashed poison gas on the Tokyo subway system. Rosen never imposes answers on us: “We can watch what others do, listen to what people say, but in the end we have to make it work for whoever we are and whatever life situation we’re in. Getting Better is written in an unusual stream-of-consciousness style which can be a bit rambling and goes off on all sorts of tangents and parenthetical detours.

It is true to my experience of reading this book and still, I don't quite know how to do this book justice. I can't say I had heard of Michael Rosen prior to picking up this book entirely by chance from my library app, despite being aware of the We're Going On A Bear Hunt story before. I think if Rosen had just talked about how writing helped him recover, without trying to get the reader to do is as well, it would have been more successful. In "The Man Without a Heart," a man learns about the value of basic labor after testing out more privileged lives. Exploring the roles that trauma and grief have played in his own life, Michael investigates the road to recovery, asking how we can find it within ourselves to live well again after - or even during - the darkest times of our lives.

Honestly, I felt really torn over the rating for this book - on a ten-point scale it would have been a seven. And on the other hand, the philosophy of somebody like Calvin, from much earlier, who thought that we're all predestined to be either saved or not saved or live or not live. There is no fix, but he details the slow process of finding a voice that allows him to talk about Eddie, aided by a child asking him a question about his son at a talk.