Things That Help: Healing Our Lives Through Feminism, Anarchism, Punk, & Adventure

by Cindy Crabb

Learn how to heal and embrace yourself through feminism, self-love, and some good old anarchism

Living in the margins of a culture she never felt comfortable in, Cindy Crabb touches on her experiences with feminism, girl-gangs, abuse, and gender identity. With stories, essays, interviews, and more, Cindy writes with fierce honesty and compassion, exploring subjects like consent, abortion, death, self-image, shyness, identity, and anarchism. Embracing the complexities of each, finding her anger, her voice, and the things that help in her struggles with addiction, mental health, and intense loss. Along the way she travels the world, helps start a women and transgender health center, and fights against the social norms that made her feel so trapped.

Genres: Feminism, Nonfiction, LGBT, Mental Health

330 pages, Paperback

First published November 28, 2017

Reviews

[Jessie]

Another fun collection of Cindy Crabb's stories and observations. For those unfamiliar, Cindy is the author of a zine anthology called Doris, which I was gifted several years ago at the age of 19. I took a lot of comfort in her writing style and commitment to the causes she tries to promote and share with others, and was inspired to write and share my own stories.

In TTH, she organizes her thoughts going through the alphabet, and writes on a topic for each letter. A is for "Apple Crisp, Audre Lorde..." P is for "Protest, Primitivism, Politics..." etc.

From the back of "Things That Help":

"Living in the margins of a culture she never felt comfortable in, Cindy Crabb touches on her experiences with feminism, girl-gangs, abuse, and gender identity with stories, essays, interviews, and more. Cindy writes with fierce honesty and compassion, exploring subjects like consent, abortion, death, self-image, shyness, identity, and anarchism--embracing the complexities of each, finding her anger, her voice, and the things that help her in her struggles with addiction, mental health, and intense loss. Along the way she travels the world, helps start a women and transgender health center, and fights against the social norms that made her feel so trapped."

[Katy]

I was really excited to find out about this book but I realized after purchasing it that it is just a repackaged version of the Encyclopedia of Doris, which I have previously read. I’m a huge Cindy Crabb fan, the content is great, but this was kind of a bummer.

[Tarah Fedenia]

Challenging and validating at the same damn time. Made me sad and perplexed, and filled me with joy, smiles, and laughter.

[Jaden]

Explores topics that, to me, are essential in personal growth, empathy, and understanding. The author gives a sort of autobiography by using zines that she has written through her life. She entails her experiences with growth, sexual assault, feminism, anarchism and her perceptions of this world around her. Absolutely reccomend(especially to those who struggle with problems internally accepting themselves!!!), seriously one of the best books I've ever read.

[Kirsten]

Good over all - some of the comics were too small to read in this trade paper format and I found parts repetitive.

[Kelly]

I took my time reading it because it was such nice company. It's arranged in groupings alphabetically, and I added some of my own in the margins.

And yes, these things did help. A lot.

[Drew]

This book helps🖤