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Things That Helped: Essays
'Through the tide of hormones surging within my body, and the little runnels of blood, and the sour tang of my breasts, I lay awake, listening, and thinking of breath and of water. I had broken my relationship with sleep.'
In this stunning collection, Jessica Friedmann navigates her journey through postpartum depression after the birth of her son. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and personal experience, her wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness.
Occasionally confronting, but always powerfully moving and beautifully observed, 'Things That Helped' charts Jessica’s return into the world: a slow and complex process of reassembling what depression fractured, and sometimes broke.
In this stunning collection, Jessica Friedmann navigates her journey through postpartum depression after the birth of her son. Drawing on critical theory, popular culture, and personal experience, her wide-ranging essays touch on class, race, gender, and sexuality, as well as motherhood, creativity, and mental illness.
Occasionally confronting, but always powerfully moving and beautifully observed, 'Things That Helped' charts Jessica’s return into the world: a slow and complex process of reassembling what depression fractured, and sometimes broke.
288 pages, Paperback
First published April 3, 2017
19 people are currently reading
1032 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
April 6, 2017
A beautifully written collection of essays about motherhood, depression, creativity and life - Friedmann is super smart, incredibly well read and combines sometimes brutal self-reflection with fascinating theory and unexpected connections.
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February 2, 2021To read these essays is to observe a keen intelligence at work both coolly analysing the social forces and gender expectations that inform our understanding of this condition, while grappling with powerful feelings that bewilder and appal her.
Saturday Age, Pick of the Week
Things That Helped is a beautiful book — heartfelt, fiercely intelligent, and urgent. It is a powerful affirmation of friendship, family, art, and love, and how these things might shape a life, and give it strength, and it does not shy away from the complex, often painful, and sometimes bloody experiences of womanhood and motherhood. It is fascinating, luscious, and engrossing, and, despite its difficult subject matter, an absolute joy to read.
Fiona Wright, Author of Small Acts of Disappearance
[A]n impressive debut … Friedmann views the world through a lens of intersectionality, and she has a sharp eye for how gender, race, and class shapes the family unit … Her language is deeply visceral, and therefore hugely affecting, when describing the feeling of pregnancy, motherhood, and mental illness … [Things That Helped] makes readers feel and think.
Books + Publishing
Deeply affective … The personal essay is a fertile genre and Friedmann’s use of the essay structure, over a more linear memoir style, is worth noting. In North America, especially, attention surrounds essayists such as Maggie Nelson and Eula Biss who similarly meld memoir and critical theory to explore topics that also appear in Friedmann’s book: gender, class, and motherhood.
Emily Laidlaw, Weekend Australian
[Friedmann] effortlessly mixes the personal and the political … Critical theory is blended into the book, but remains accessible and not intrusive. The intersection between selfhood, motherhood, and womanhood are all written about with visceral candour, and she uses imagery to startling effect.
Thuy On, The Big Issue
Jessica Friedmann has left safety behind and walked into something vast — a self, a world, on the verge of unravelling yet exhilarating and full of love. This book runs deep and wide. It’s alive with arresting images, with thoughts too big, sometimes too dangerous, to pin down.
Maria Tumarkin
Friedmann has written a brutally insightful and often heartbreaking study of the complexities of womanhood. Her transportive writing will break you open and fill you anew.
Anna Spargo-Ryan, Author of The Paper House
Friedmann’s deeply personal story takes the reader on captivating digressions, from the intergenerational trauma of Holocaust survivors, to the latest cross-cultural research on postnatal depression.
Readings Monthly
[A]n extraordinary account of extreme postnatal depression, as seen from the eye of the storm.
Viv Groskop, The Guardian
Reveals the strange dichotomy between absence and excess of feeling … [Friedmann] writes with brutal originality.
TLS
While the occasion for this book is Friedmann’s experience of post-partum depression, Things That Helped points to the larger question of becoming a writer-mother, and the ways a traumatic splitting of the self might relate to a creative one, and how, in consciously reintegrating aspects of self, a powerful, self-aware and writerly subjectivity might emerge.
There is an analogic intelligence at work, a sense of metaphor pushing behind each piece of the book, finding connections that weave each part of with others.
There are skeins here, not a single narrative strand, and it is in their braiding that hopes of making and loving are recovered.
Sydney Review of Books
While I’d recommend this book to almost anyone, I’d particularly recommend it to those who, like me, jumped on the Solnit train and are looking for some more discerning and beautifully executed feminist criticism to get excited about — not that there’s any shortage. It’s incredible to read Friedmann engaging with so many voices without having them, even for a minute, drown out her own.
Grace McCarter, Hot Chicks with Big Brains
A beautifully lyrical and intellectually complex series of essays … Jessica Friedmann is able
Erin Bartnett, Electric Literature
A necessary and compelling collection of essays … In reading Friedmann, one thing is clear: she is an extraordinary thinker, a precise and complex writer, a tireless seeker of le mot juste … Watching a keen mind wrestle is one of the pleasures of reading nonfiction, and this book is a prime example … Despite the horror she narrates, her prose rarely strays from a calm, thoughtful tone. And this is the genius of Things That Helped: it’s bringing light to an aspect of women’s lives that publishing has thus far turned away from, and it’s doing so with such beauty, with such precision and skill, that these struggles can no longer be ignored.
Katharine Coldiron, Proximity
Exquisitely written … breathtaking … Wise, thoughtful, and provocative, Things That Helped raises important issues and asks important questions about white privilege, unequal access to medical care, cultural memory, and how best to navigate complex relationships with peers, family, employers, and acquaintances. The things that helped Friedmann may not help everyone suffering from postpartum depression, but as a testament to recovery, the text is sure to inspire, uplift, and educate.
Eleanor J. Bader, Rewire.News
[Friedmann] never succumbs to sentimentality in these pages even when it's obvious how much she loves (or has learned to love) her son and how fortunate she feels for all that she has. Well-rendered essays that make readers think and feel deeply.
Kirkus Reviews
By carefully and deliberately describing the pain, dissociation, discomfort, alienation, and other forms of havoc she experienced after birthing her son, Friedmann legitimates and recognises the physical, psychological, and political features of postpartum depression.
Booklist
Saturday Age, Pick of the Week
Things That Helped is a beautiful book — heartfelt, fiercely intelligent, and urgent. It is a powerful affirmation of friendship, family, art, and love, and how these things might shape a life, and give it strength, and it does not shy away from the complex, often painful, and sometimes bloody experiences of womanhood and motherhood. It is fascinating, luscious, and engrossing, and, despite its difficult subject matter, an absolute joy to read.
Fiona Wright, Author of Small Acts of Disappearance
[A]n impressive debut … Friedmann views the world through a lens of intersectionality, and she has a sharp eye for how gender, race, and class shapes the family unit … Her language is deeply visceral, and therefore hugely affecting, when describing the feeling of pregnancy, motherhood, and mental illness … [Things That Helped] makes readers feel and think.
Books + Publishing
Deeply affective … The personal essay is a fertile genre and Friedmann’s use of the essay structure, over a more linear memoir style, is worth noting. In North America, especially, attention surrounds essayists such as Maggie Nelson and Eula Biss who similarly meld memoir and critical theory to explore topics that also appear in Friedmann’s book: gender, class, and motherhood.
Emily Laidlaw, Weekend Australian
[Friedmann] effortlessly mixes the personal and the political … Critical theory is blended into the book, but remains accessible and not intrusive. The intersection between selfhood, motherhood, and womanhood are all written about with visceral candour, and she uses imagery to startling effect.
Thuy On, The Big Issue
Jessica Friedmann has left safety behind and walked into something vast — a self, a world, on the verge of unravelling yet exhilarating and full of love. This book runs deep and wide. It’s alive with arresting images, with thoughts too big, sometimes too dangerous, to pin down.
Maria Tumarkin
Friedmann has written a brutally insightful and often heartbreaking study of the complexities of womanhood. Her transportive writing will break you open and fill you anew.
Anna Spargo-Ryan, Author of The Paper House
Friedmann’s deeply personal story takes the reader on captivating digressions, from the intergenerational trauma of Holocaust survivors, to the latest cross-cultural research on postnatal depression.
Readings Monthly
[A]n extraordinary account of extreme postnatal depression, as seen from the eye of the storm.
Viv Groskop, The Guardian
Reveals the strange dichotomy between absence and excess of feeling … [Friedmann] writes with brutal originality.
TLS
While the occasion for this book is Friedmann’s experience of post-partum depression, Things That Helped points to the larger question of becoming a writer-mother, and the ways a traumatic splitting of the self might relate to a creative one, and how, in consciously reintegrating aspects of self, a powerful, self-aware and writerly subjectivity might emerge.
There is an analogic intelligence at work, a sense of metaphor pushing behind each piece of the book, finding connections that weave each part of with others.
There are skeins here, not a single narrative strand, and it is in their braiding that hopes of making and loving are recovered.
Sydney Review of Books
While I’d recommend this book to almost anyone, I’d particularly recommend it to those who, like me, jumped on the Solnit train and are looking for some more discerning and beautifully executed feminist criticism to get excited about — not that there’s any shortage. It’s incredible to read Friedmann engaging with so many voices without having them, even for a minute, drown out her own.
Grace McCarter, Hot Chicks with Big Brains
A beautifully lyrical and intellectually complex series of essays … Jessica Friedmann is able
Erin Bartnett, Electric Literature
A necessary and compelling collection of essays … In reading Friedmann, one thing is clear: she is an extraordinary thinker, a precise and complex writer, a tireless seeker of le mot juste … Watching a keen mind wrestle is one of the pleasures of reading nonfiction, and this book is a prime example … Despite the horror she narrates, her prose rarely strays from a calm, thoughtful tone. And this is the genius of Things That Helped: it’s bringing light to an aspect of women’s lives that publishing has thus far turned away from, and it’s doing so with such beauty, with such precision and skill, that these struggles can no longer be ignored.
Katharine Coldiron, Proximity
Exquisitely written … breathtaking … Wise, thoughtful, and provocative, Things That Helped raises important issues and asks important questions about white privilege, unequal access to medical care, cultural memory, and how best to navigate complex relationships with peers, family, employers, and acquaintances. The things that helped Friedmann may not help everyone suffering from postpartum depression, but as a testament to recovery, the text is sure to inspire, uplift, and educate.
Eleanor J. Bader, Rewire.News
[Friedmann] never succumbs to sentimentality in these pages even when it's obvious how much she loves (or has learned to love) her son and how fortunate she feels for all that she has. Well-rendered essays that make readers think and feel deeply.
Kirkus Reviews
By carefully and deliberately describing the pain, dissociation, discomfort, alienation, and other forms of havoc she experienced after birthing her son, Friedmann legitimates and recognises the physical, psychological, and political features of postpartum depression.
Booklist
April 20, 2021
Harrowing glimpse into the darkest days of a postpartum suicidal depression, intertwined with things and ideas that brought her back. Challenging but worth it.
July 17, 2017
Ultimately, I loved what the author did here, despite some minor irritations along the way - in staking a claim for her writing, she also made a powerful claim for female experience as worthy of literary treatment (or vice versa). Now I know it's not the 1970s, so writing about post natal depression and the tensions between motherhood and the life of the mind / paid work etc should not be unusual - and it's not - but done this way I was freshly reminded how radical it can still be to examine these themes. Given the varied ruminations here it was inevitable that not all of it resonated, but by the end I was well into the flow of these finely crafted, deeply felt and properly thoughtful essays.
April 10, 2017
Friedmann is a stunning writer and this is a very strong essay collection. I almost wished it was memoir so I could sink into her writing more. That said, I love Australian essay collections and hope to see many more. Friedmann's raw, occasionally confronting and honest accounts of postpartum depression, white privilege, religious identity and modern day womanhood are beautifully observed. My only criticism is that there are a few essays where Friedmann gets bogged down in critical theory and the writings of others, quoting large sections of their writing. These essays felt more like academic writings than what I want from a general essay collection.
May 19, 2017
A near perfect collection of personal essays and critical theory. Friedmann is an exceptional writer and her written experiences of motherhood and postnatal depression are particularly moving and insightful. Only one essay here didn't really work for me and that's hardly a criticism in such a strong and diverse collection. This is a voice that we need to hear more from.
June 5, 2017
This collection of thoughtful, beautiful essays deals with motherhood, art, mental health, culture, bodies and creativity. I particularly connected with Jess's writing on Judaism and privilege. So much to think about.
June 27, 2017
Stunningly written.
November 27, 2017
A beautiful memoir about Friedmann's journey through postpartum depression. The essays are structured based on things that helped her through to recovery and touch on various other themes such as migration, art, spirituality, ethnicity. I loved this collection and Friedmann's frank voice.
April 22, 2017
Jessica Friedmann's book, Things That Helped, deftly threads essay, memoir and critical theory through the despair of Friedmann's post-natal depression to weave an impressive debut.
Friedmann reflects on her experience of motherhood with the benefit of distance, both geographic and temporal. She now lives and writes in Canberra, anchored in an inland city far removed from Melbourne's Maribyrnong river where she fantasised about drowning herself. The cool, calm river a siren calling her from her misery towards annihilation.
While Friedmann's focus in her post-natal depression, her essays radiate out across art, feminism, music, the environment, marriage and race. It is an enthralling journey through her expansive knowledge and sharp mind. This isn't a 10-step recovery narrative. It is 12-chapter chipping away at the edifice of depression, each chapter offering a thing that helped.
Emily Laidlaw and Kara Nicholson both place Friedmann's book alongside Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts and Fiona Wright's Small Acts of Disappearance as stablemates in genre. I found Nelson's dense critical theory a hard slog. In contrast, Friedmann wears her theory delicately. It never weighs her writing down. Like Wright in her exploration of anorexia, Friedmann deconstructs her mental health struggle honestly in all of its complicated mess. Neither Wright nor Friedmann offer easy answers, instead they raise difficult questions about being a woman.
They simultaneously hold up a mirror to themselves and to society, laying bare the imperfections of both.
It is a revelation to watch the recent emergence of women's writing on mental health from Australian writers such as Friedmann, Wright and Anna Spargo-Ryan. Their important narratives open up room for discussion and better understanding of the experiences of the many women wrestling mental health challenges. This kind of writing can save people.
Friedmann reflects on her experience of motherhood with the benefit of distance, both geographic and temporal. She now lives and writes in Canberra, anchored in an inland city far removed from Melbourne's Maribyrnong river where she fantasised about drowning herself. The cool, calm river a siren calling her from her misery towards annihilation.
While Friedmann's focus in her post-natal depression, her essays radiate out across art, feminism, music, the environment, marriage and race. It is an enthralling journey through her expansive knowledge and sharp mind. This isn't a 10-step recovery narrative. It is 12-chapter chipping away at the edifice of depression, each chapter offering a thing that helped.
Emily Laidlaw and Kara Nicholson both place Friedmann's book alongside Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts and Fiona Wright's Small Acts of Disappearance as stablemates in genre. I found Nelson's dense critical theory a hard slog. In contrast, Friedmann wears her theory delicately. It never weighs her writing down. Like Wright in her exploration of anorexia, Friedmann deconstructs her mental health struggle honestly in all of its complicated mess. Neither Wright nor Friedmann offer easy answers, instead they raise difficult questions about being a woman.
They simultaneously hold up a mirror to themselves and to society, laying bare the imperfections of both.
It is a revelation to watch the recent emergence of women's writing on mental health from Australian writers such as Friedmann, Wright and Anna Spargo-Ryan. Their important narratives open up room for discussion and better understanding of the experiences of the many women wrestling mental health challenges. This kind of writing can save people.
March 14, 2018
Never has a book been so relatable, so deeply connected to my identity. I often felt as though I was reading something I myself had written in a dream - regardless of the fact that I am currently childless. I thoroughly appreciate the raw realness of mental health being openly expressed in such a beautifully immaculate way.
My favorite essays (though they were all perfect, these ones resonated deeply for me): Maribyrnong; Pho; Red lips; Swanlights, turning; Rings; Ainslie.
'Nobody tells you, as a child that your initiation into womanhood might come at the price of a craving for misuse and violence; that you can protect yourself from others, but that nobody can protect yourself from you.' - Swanlights, turning.
'I look at Mike's sleeping body when I wake, and marvel at the ongoingness of his presence in our bed, this solid, freckled pillar of strong bone and love. For the moment, in the richness of a morning, it is vividly, intensely enough.' - Rings
I am instantly yearning for Friedman's next book.
My favorite essays (though they were all perfect, these ones resonated deeply for me): Maribyrnong; Pho; Red lips; Swanlights, turning; Rings; Ainslie.
'Nobody tells you, as a child that your initiation into womanhood might come at the price of a craving for misuse and violence; that you can protect yourself from others, but that nobody can protect yourself from you.' - Swanlights, turning.
'I look at Mike's sleeping body when I wake, and marvel at the ongoingness of his presence in our bed, this solid, freckled pillar of strong bone and love. For the moment, in the richness of a morning, it is vividly, intensely enough.' - Rings
I am instantly yearning for Friedman's next book.
Read
July 12, 2018I don’t feel like I can give this book an accurate rating because it was not what I expected so I was disappointed. In the US it is being marketed as a memoir with the subtitle “On Postpartum Depression” so I thought it would be primarily essays about the author’s experience with a postpartum mood disorder. As a midwife and pregnant person, this is really what I wanted to read, and I found myself very confused when the bulk of her subject matter was not about postpartum depression. I skimmed for the paragraphs that were about PPD and wish there had been more! So as a memoir about PPD this book gets 2 stars. Maybe someday I’ll read it again without that framework in mind and be able to consider it from a different perspective.
Read
February 8, 2023'He knows, even if he doesn't understand, how much the sound of the refrigerator hurts'
October 22, 2024
Look, I have mixed feelings about this book. I read it at the same time as The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson and it’s the same kind of subject matter, but a bit less depressing. Still, she is a talented writer and I don’t mean to attack her personally, but my god it shows me that if I were in her position, with her headspace, I would never have a child. It sounds absolutely horrendous. And I know she loves her man, but yeah she is not selling me on the cult of heterosexuality. She understands it herself, right at the end, that his career is favoured over hers, thank goodness she can write, and is successful at that, because otherwise she would just be another depressed military wife.
Another thing that irks me, and maybe I’d feel differently if I had a barn, but she exalts her child, he is everything to her, total obliteration, over career and sense of self. And it kind of made me sad, like okay.. this whole thing, all you’ve sacrificed, your home, your city, family (moving for her husbands work), your mental health, your career.. all for a snotty kid. She worships him, and forgets that having a kid is mundane, it is so common, literally (almost) everyone can do it.
I sought this out perhaps as a prophecy, to save myself the same journey.. I don’t know what I was expecting but post natal depression is exactly as bad as I fear.
Another thing that irks me, and maybe I’d feel differently if I had a barn, but she exalts her child, he is everything to her, total obliteration, over career and sense of self. And it kind of made me sad, like okay.. this whole thing, all you’ve sacrificed, your home, your city, family (moving for her husbands work), your mental health, your career.. all for a snotty kid. She worships him, and forgets that having a kid is mundane, it is so common, literally (almost) everyone can do it.
I sought this out perhaps as a prophecy, to save myself the same journey.. I don’t know what I was expecting but post natal depression is exactly as bad as I fear.
October 16, 2017
This is a beautifully written collection of essays. My local library has shelved it in its 'Parenting' collection, but it is much more than a memoir of postnatal depression, delving into broad-ranging critical theory and cultural and literary analysis.
Rather than charting the author's experiences chronologically, each essay is based around something that aided her recovery and helped her find and redefine herself. There are some fascinating explorations of the themes of each essay and how they can be understood in a broader cultural context. However, it was the author's descriptions of her own experiences that I found most compelling. She has written beautifully and movingly of her depression and anxiety, and I found much that I could relate to.
Despite its difficult subject matter, I found this to be ultimately an uplifting book and a very worthwhile read.
Rather than charting the author's experiences chronologically, each essay is based around something that aided her recovery and helped her find and redefine herself. There are some fascinating explorations of the themes of each essay and how they can be understood in a broader cultural context. However, it was the author's descriptions of her own experiences that I found most compelling. She has written beautifully and movingly of her depression and anxiety, and I found much that I could relate to.
Despite its difficult subject matter, I found this to be ultimately an uplifting book and a very worthwhile read.
December 19, 2017
I feel like reading this essay collection was extremely valuable to me.
I loved how local it felt because of our shared city. I love the way she pieces ideas together, borrowing from other artists and academics in a meaningful and familiar way.
The topics were particularly important to me, but so was the way it was put together and communicated and rooted.
I appreciated each and every essay separately, and as parts of a whole.
So glad I decided to pick this book up on a whim, in a bookshop in the CBD.
I loved how local it felt because of our shared city. I love the way she pieces ideas together, borrowing from other artists and academics in a meaningful and familiar way.
The topics were particularly important to me, but so was the way it was put together and communicated and rooted.
I appreciated each and every essay separately, and as parts of a whole.
So glad I decided to pick this book up on a whim, in a bookshop in the CBD.
April 6, 2019
This book is amongst the best non-fiction titles I've ever read, blending essays with literary memoir, written with the most humane touch. Especially enjoyed the essay that focused so much on Anohni, whom I also love! Each essay is brutal and heartfelt without ever verging on the melodramatic or the cliché. Friedmann writes with a knife and an steely resolve, earning the empathetic tears her readers shed. I will happily read anything and everything that Jessica Friedmann writes in the future and I hope you will too.
September 8, 2021
As someone who has never experienced postpartum or postnatal depression I thought it would be difficult to understand but I felt a more intimate link to the author’s descriptions and experiences. My attention waned during the long passages about the other plethora topics from gender to religion. I wished with each chapter the chosen topic and her illness had somehow been interwoven together because sometimes I struggled to see the relevancy before reading the last page of the chapter then gaining some form of understanding. Regardless, Friedmann’s writing was beautiful coherently.
June 20, 2017
I loved this book so much. I loved all the similarities and differences between my life and hers. I loved the tone and the cadence of her writing. I loved the weird feeling of knowing the places and things she wrote about, and then that one thing we don't have in common, which made me think "there but for the grace of god..." It was perfect and mean girls are going to want to tear it apart, but I won't.
May 19, 2018
This reminded me of the 2017 title Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life by Yiyun Li, which is also an essay collection where a woman writer battles depression, struggles with family life and finds solace in cultural activities. Perhaps this is a new publishing trend. Of the two, I preferred Friedmann's because she writes extremely well, and tackles a difficult subject in an honest way, sometimes uncomfortably so. The book covers a variety of topics and is not just an account of postpartum depression - as is often the case, the title doesn't quite do it justice.
I am not sure who her readers will be, though. As other reviewers have suggested, if you are in the throes of new motherhood, you are going to struggle with this one. Friedmann herself puts it best: "When I read, the words make no impression on my brain, vanishing before I finish a paragraph, so that I have to read it again and again to glean its meaning" (p.129). Yes, too true. For the sleep-impaired reader, her forays into critical theory will present a challenge, her stories of domestic life less so.
I am not sure who her readers will be, though. As other reviewers have suggested, if you are in the throes of new motherhood, you are going to struggle with this one. Friedmann herself puts it best: "When I read, the words make no impression on my brain, vanishing before I finish a paragraph, so that I have to read it again and again to glean its meaning" (p.129). Yes, too true. For the sleep-impaired reader, her forays into critical theory will present a challenge, her stories of domestic life less so.
October 21, 2019
A smart and sensitive essay collection from a brilliant woman juggling artistic ambition, depression, a toddler, and a working partner. I picked up this book for Friedmann's writing about motherhood, so I wasn't super-interested in her essays about Judaism or art, but I get that she's writing about her whole self. Her clear-eyed writing about post-partum depression is visceral and brave.
Read
May 30, 2020Maybe not the thing to read when six months pregnant; then again, maybe I wouldn't have taken so many notes if not six months pregnant. Hard to say how this essay collection might hit me under different circumstances, but I found this to be thought-provoking, smart, and beautiful. Definitely looking forward to whatever Friedmann publishes next.
November 26, 2017
I liked this and it reads in that way where you say to yourself I could have written something like this and then you realise that you actually couldn't and that's half the skill of the writing - tricking you into thinking it was effortless.
June 29, 2018
Incredible writing; important meditations on life, femininity, gender, critical theory, marriage, kids, partnership, and pregnancy and mental illness, of course; and just plain emotionally moving, satisfying, and substantial.
October 3, 2018
Hauntingly, chillingly, magnificently accurate for anyone who has ever experienced any realm of postpartum depression. Even just the description of the motherhood transition are wrought with appropriate intensity.
April 23, 2019
Exceptionally expressed with raw intensity and believe it or not—occasional humor. It’s intensity is partially responsible for why it took me so long to get through. Nonetheless, Jessica Friedman deserves more opportunities to tell stories either related to her life or otherwise.
October 10, 2020
Beautifully related the experience of postpartum depression, the invasive thoughts, the fear, the emotions, the incredible and indescribable need that you feel. It's an ocean of all this and more and Friedmann makes poetry out of it and soothes my soul.
July 23, 2022
Read this on two flights. I was amazed by it. It’s really big brain energy but also so sad, but “things that helped” is also the perfect title. Nothing as naff as a gratitude diary, but nonetheless focused on the incremental things that helped in the author’s experience of postnatal depression.
August 2, 2017
A brave book, beautifully written.
October 16, 2017
Concise, brilliant, heart-felt - loved the form of linked essays. Highly recommend.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews