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This Really Isn't About You
In 2014 I moved back to the United States after living abroad for fourteen years, my whole adult life, because my father was dying from cancer.
Six weeks after I arrived in New York City, my father died.
Six months after that I learned that I had inherited the gene that would cause me cancer too.
When Jean Hannah Edelstein’s world overturned she was forced to confront some of the big questions in life: How do we cope with grief? How does living change when we realize we’re not invincible? Does knowing our likely fate make it harder or easier to face the future? How do you motivate yourself to go on your OkCupid date when you’re struggling with your own mortality?
Written in her inimitable, wry and insightful voice, Jean Hannah Edelstein’s memoir is by turns heart-breaking, hopeful and yet also disarmingly funny. This Really Isn’t About You is a book about finding your way in life. Which is to say, it’s a book about discovering you are not really in control of that at all.
Six weeks after I arrived in New York City, my father died.
Six months after that I learned that I had inherited the gene that would cause me cancer too.
When Jean Hannah Edelstein’s world overturned she was forced to confront some of the big questions in life: How do we cope with grief? How does living change when we realize we’re not invincible? Does knowing our likely fate make it harder or easier to face the future? How do you motivate yourself to go on your OkCupid date when you’re struggling with your own mortality?
Written in her inimitable, wry and insightful voice, Jean Hannah Edelstein’s memoir is by turns heart-breaking, hopeful and yet also disarmingly funny. This Really Isn’t About You is a book about finding your way in life. Which is to say, it’s a book about discovering you are not really in control of that at all.
272 pages, Paperback
Published August 23, 2018
35 people are currently reading
2796 people want to read
About the author
Jean Hannah Edelstein
6 books46 followersJean Hannah Edelstein is a writer who lives in Brooklyn. She writes regularly for outlets including the Guardian and The Pool, and a weekly newsletter, which Vogue said 'pops up in your inbox like lucid dreaming.' She also writes marketing emails for tech companies, so you've probably deleted her work.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 87 reviews
December 14, 2018
This was the book I wanted Places I Stopped on the Way Home to be: a wry, bittersweet look at the unpredictability of life as an idealistic young woman in the world’s major cities. Edelstein’s memoir also fits into several of my favorite subgenres: it’s a family memoir, a medical memoir and a bereavement memoir all at once. The story opens in Brooklyn in February 2014 as Edelstein, age 32, is trying to build an adult life back in America after 14 years in London and Berlin. Two years earlier her father had told her via Skype from Baltimore that he had lung cancer, and she returned to the States to be closer to help. But when the moment came, she was still unprepared: “if someone had said to me: What would you like to be doing when your father dies? I would not have said, I would like to be looking for love on OKCupid. But I did not have the luxury to make that decision. Who does?”
Her father never smoked yet died of lung cancer; his mother had colon cancer and died at 42. Both had Lynch syndrome, a genetic disease that predisposes people to various cancers. Six months after her father’s death, Edelstein took a genetic test, as he had wanted her to, and learned that she was positive for the Lynch syndrome mutation. The book’s structure (“Between” – “Before” – “After”) plunges readers right into the middle of the family mess, then pulls back to survey her earlier life, everything from childhood holidays in her mother’s native Scotland to being a secretary to a London literary agent who hated her, before returning to the turning point of that diagnosis. How is she going to live with this knowledge hanging over her? Doctors want her to have a prophylactic hysterectomy, but how can she rule out children when she doesn’t yet have a partner in her life?
So many aspects of this book resonated for me, especially moving between countries and having a genetic disease in the family. Beyond those major themes, there were tiny moments that felt uncannily familiar to me, like when she’s helping her mother prepare for an online auction of the contents of the family home in Maryland, or comparing the average cleanliness and comfort of rental properties in England and the States. There are so many little memorable scenes in this memoir: having an allergic reaction to shellfish two days after her arrival in the States, getting locked out of her sublet and having to call an Uzbek/Israeli locksmith at 3 a.m., and subsisting on oatmeal three times a day in London versus going on all-expenses-paid trips to Estonia and Mauritius for a conference travel magazine.
This is a clear-eyed look at life in all its irony (such as the fact that she’s claustrophobic and dreads getting MRI tests when it was her own father, a nuclear physicist, who built the world’s first full-body MRI scanner at Aberdeen) and disappointment. I’m prizing this as a prime example of life writing that’s not comprehensive or strictly chronological yet gives a clear sense of the self in the context of a family and in the face of an uncertain future.
Readalikes:
The Family Gene by Joselin Linder
My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff
Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens
Favorite lines:
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
Her father never smoked yet died of lung cancer; his mother had colon cancer and died at 42. Both had Lynch syndrome, a genetic disease that predisposes people to various cancers. Six months after her father’s death, Edelstein took a genetic test, as he had wanted her to, and learned that she was positive for the Lynch syndrome mutation. The book’s structure (“Between” – “Before” – “After”) plunges readers right into the middle of the family mess, then pulls back to survey her earlier life, everything from childhood holidays in her mother’s native Scotland to being a secretary to a London literary agent who hated her, before returning to the turning point of that diagnosis. How is she going to live with this knowledge hanging over her? Doctors want her to have a prophylactic hysterectomy, but how can she rule out children when she doesn’t yet have a partner in her life?
So many aspects of this book resonated for me, especially moving between countries and having a genetic disease in the family. Beyond those major themes, there were tiny moments that felt uncannily familiar to me, like when she’s helping her mother prepare for an online auction of the contents of the family home in Maryland, or comparing the average cleanliness and comfort of rental properties in England and the States. There are so many little memorable scenes in this memoir: having an allergic reaction to shellfish two days after her arrival in the States, getting locked out of her sublet and having to call an Uzbek/Israeli locksmith at 3 a.m., and subsisting on oatmeal three times a day in London versus going on all-expenses-paid trips to Estonia and Mauritius for a conference travel magazine.
This is a clear-eyed look at life in all its irony (such as the fact that she’s claustrophobic and dreads getting MRI tests when it was her own father, a nuclear physicist, who built the world’s first full-body MRI scanner at Aberdeen) and disappointment. I’m prizing this as a prime example of life writing that’s not comprehensive or strictly chronological yet gives a clear sense of the self in the context of a family and in the face of an uncertain future.
Readalikes:
The Family Gene by Joselin Linder
My Salinger Year by Joanna Rakoff
Mrs Gaskell & Me by Nell Stevens
Favorite lines:
“when I was in London, … I wondered if the problem of having my whole life ahead of me, free and clear and open for anything, was that having an unlimited number of options made the chance of choosing the wrong thing so high.”
“I was not yet old enough to realize that I’d never really know, that there would never be a time when I could think: I am here. This is me, without becoming uncertain again a moment later.”
“When I lived in England I drank a lot of tea, many cups a day, even though I didn’t like it. I learned quite fast after I arrived in London that drinking tea was an important way to connect with people: when I went over to their homes, or if we worked together in an office. Being offered a cup of tea meant that you were being offered an entry to something, and accepting it was important.”
Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.
June 25, 2020
Based on what I read, I don’t think Edelstein had enough interesting material to merit a memoir. She is chatty about her jobs, squalid lodgings, nasty bosses, and unsatisfactory boyfriends, supplying no end of mundane detail about them. The book was not what I was expecting: i.e., an exploration of life with Lynch syndrome and the death of her dad, whom the author writes about lovingly. (That I did like.) Overall, however, I was bored by this. I abandoned the memoir with relief at the halfway mark.
January 25, 2019
Olivia Laing calls Jean Hannah Edelstein, author of the memoir, This Really Isn't About You, 'one of the most brilliant writers of her generation.' This, her second book, revolves around her father's death from cancer, and discovering six months afterwards that she had inherited the gene for Lynch syndrome, which causes many different kinds of cancer to form.
Edelstein, who was thirty-two at the time, moved back to the United States in 2014, when she was told her father was dying from lung cancer. Up until this point, she had spent her entire adult life abroad, and was settled in London, where she worked as a freelance journalist, supplementing her passion for writing with temporary office jobs. Six weeks after she arrives back at home, and almost simultaneous to her renting an apartment in New York City, her father passes away: 'I was in Brooklyn looking for love on OKCupid when my father died.'
She goes on to reveal: 'That night in February, I had a rare feeling of contentment, or something like it... I was beginning to feel like it might be time to build my real life in America... Maybe my life was almost under control.' She reflects here on her father's death in the family home in Baltimore: 'My father tried to eat dinner, and then he told my mother that he was really not feeling well, and then he stood up from the easy chair where he had been spending most of his days for the last few weeks, and then he collapsed and died on the wooden floor in the space between the dining area and the family room.'
Edelstein begins her memoir by writing about her family history; she does this with humour and love. She discusses, in part, her Jewish father's relationship with his faith: 'As far as I know, the ways in which my father was Jewish were mostly food ways: he ate briny fish and cold beet soup from jars. Pumpernickel bagels, grainy dark breads. My father drank little alcohol - Jews don't really drink, he'd say, which was maybe less of a fact than a rumour - and he avoided pork products. When pressed, he claimed it was less a fear of God than a fear of trichinosis.' Amongst other elements, she talks of summer holidays spent with her Scottish grandmother in rainy Dumfries, moving to London for graduate school, and falling in and out of love.
Finding out that she had the gene for Lynch syndrome was, as one would expect, difficult to come to terms with. Her siblings and cousin, when they were tested, were found to be clear of the gene. Edelstein is convinced, however, from the moment at which her father suggests that she goes to see her doctor, that she carries it: '... I had decided not to get tested while Dad was alive. I couldn't imagine telling him that I had the thing that was killing him.' She goes on to explain: 'My father had been dead for six months before I was brave enough to go and get the test. I was no longer in a state of deepest grief. I didn't cry every day any more. Just some of them.'
Lynch syndrome is a gene mutation, which around 1 in 400 people carry: 'It's found in all kinds of people, but in particular it's found in people who can trace their origins to certain "founder populations". Folks who built families with people like them. People from Finland. People from Iceland. French-Canadians. The Amish. Ashkenazi Jews.' Following her own diagnosis, Edelstein was forced to confront some incredibly tough questions about both her present and her future: 'How do we cope with grief? How does living change when we realize we're not invincible?'
This Really Isn't About You has been variously described as heartbreaking, filled with hope, and 'disarmingly funny'. I found it to be all of these things; it is a rich memoir, full and quite revealing at times. I enjoyed her brand of humour, which tends to be quite dry and sarcastic. Edelstein's authorial voice is consistently warm and candid, and a real pleasure to read, despite the more difficult scenes which she has described. Her writing feels like a cathartic exercise; she has to come to terms with so much, and is open about it all to her audience. Edelstein's tone, and her intelligent and measured prose, coupled with the substance of the memoir, makes This Really Isn't About You both an easy, and very difficult, book to read.
Edelstein, who was thirty-two at the time, moved back to the United States in 2014, when she was told her father was dying from lung cancer. Up until this point, she had spent her entire adult life abroad, and was settled in London, where she worked as a freelance journalist, supplementing her passion for writing with temporary office jobs. Six weeks after she arrives back at home, and almost simultaneous to her renting an apartment in New York City, her father passes away: 'I was in Brooklyn looking for love on OKCupid when my father died.'
She goes on to reveal: 'That night in February, I had a rare feeling of contentment, or something like it... I was beginning to feel like it might be time to build my real life in America... Maybe my life was almost under control.' She reflects here on her father's death in the family home in Baltimore: 'My father tried to eat dinner, and then he told my mother that he was really not feeling well, and then he stood up from the easy chair where he had been spending most of his days for the last few weeks, and then he collapsed and died on the wooden floor in the space between the dining area and the family room.'
Edelstein begins her memoir by writing about her family history; she does this with humour and love. She discusses, in part, her Jewish father's relationship with his faith: 'As far as I know, the ways in which my father was Jewish were mostly food ways: he ate briny fish and cold beet soup from jars. Pumpernickel bagels, grainy dark breads. My father drank little alcohol - Jews don't really drink, he'd say, which was maybe less of a fact than a rumour - and he avoided pork products. When pressed, he claimed it was less a fear of God than a fear of trichinosis.' Amongst other elements, she talks of summer holidays spent with her Scottish grandmother in rainy Dumfries, moving to London for graduate school, and falling in and out of love.
Finding out that she had the gene for Lynch syndrome was, as one would expect, difficult to come to terms with. Her siblings and cousin, when they were tested, were found to be clear of the gene. Edelstein is convinced, however, from the moment at which her father suggests that she goes to see her doctor, that she carries it: '... I had decided not to get tested while Dad was alive. I couldn't imagine telling him that I had the thing that was killing him.' She goes on to explain: 'My father had been dead for six months before I was brave enough to go and get the test. I was no longer in a state of deepest grief. I didn't cry every day any more. Just some of them.'
Lynch syndrome is a gene mutation, which around 1 in 400 people carry: 'It's found in all kinds of people, but in particular it's found in people who can trace their origins to certain "founder populations". Folks who built families with people like them. People from Finland. People from Iceland. French-Canadians. The Amish. Ashkenazi Jews.' Following her own diagnosis, Edelstein was forced to confront some incredibly tough questions about both her present and her future: 'How do we cope with grief? How does living change when we realize we're not invincible?'
This Really Isn't About You has been variously described as heartbreaking, filled with hope, and 'disarmingly funny'. I found it to be all of these things; it is a rich memoir, full and quite revealing at times. I enjoyed her brand of humour, which tends to be quite dry and sarcastic. Edelstein's authorial voice is consistently warm and candid, and a real pleasure to read, despite the more difficult scenes which she has described. Her writing feels like a cathartic exercise; she has to come to terms with so much, and is open about it all to her audience. Edelstein's tone, and her intelligent and measured prose, coupled with the substance of the memoir, makes This Really Isn't About You both an easy, and very difficult, book to read.
April 9, 2020
I bought this without knowing anything about the author but it was advertised as funny and i love funny memoirs. Well, i certainly didn't love this one. I just really couldn't connect with it and the writing style didn't particularly help in making me engage either. I also didn't really find it funny. Every chapter had one or two sentences, two or three paragraphs at best that were funny, and in between were often long rambly bits that almost made me stop reading the book entirely. About halfway through I also realized that the author had just really failed at making me interested in her life. I even kept thinking: Why was this memoir written at all? Yeah, she lost her dad and has a super high risk of getting cancer, but is that really the base to justify a memoir? This probably sounds super mean but i keep thinking: well, i was born with a pretty rare medical condition and had ton of other medical complications, can tell more or less funny stories about the idiots i've dated and i've even had a coloscopy as well! Does that mean i should write a memoir?!
February 27, 2019
- I thought this would be better
- The author wasn't particularly likelable despite her unfortunate circumstances
- The story wasn't told in a particularly engaging manner; some of it was rambly
- There was no real takeaway
- I thought about abandoning the book but stuck with it in the hopes of it becoming more coherent. It didn't.
- The author wasn't particularly likelable despite her unfortunate circumstances
- The story wasn't told in a particularly engaging manner; some of it was rambly
- There was no real takeaway
- I thought about abandoning the book but stuck with it in the hopes of it becoming more coherent. It didn't.
February 18, 2019
Is it just me who finished this book questioning its purpose? It was a pleasant and easy read but it lacked something. I didn't really take anything away from it. If someone asked me if I'd recommend it I'd say 'meh it's up to you maybe you'll get more out of it than me'.
August 24, 2018
Had me crying, had me laughing, had me feeling all the feels.
December 22, 2019
Quite confusing.
This book has been one of my weirdest reading experiences so far. Sometimes it had me crying and wailing (really), while others, I had a strange feeling that this reading was meaningless. Literally. I am still confused and this is what makes this book so special to me. I almost spent 3 hours in the bookshop trying to get me a good book and it took me over 20 pages to figure out if this would be a worthy buy or not. I totally recommend it to anyone. Jean's experience on becoming an adult and successfully (or unsuccessfully) dealing with life's ups and downs, can easily be compared to almost anyones else's life journey. One thing is for sure: Life, sometimes, has other plans for you and how Jean expresses her emotions and feelings in words, is penetrating.
This book has been one of my weirdest reading experiences so far. Sometimes it had me crying and wailing (really), while others, I had a strange feeling that this reading was meaningless. Literally. I am still confused and this is what makes this book so special to me. I almost spent 3 hours in the bookshop trying to get me a good book and it took me over 20 pages to figure out if this would be a worthy buy or not. I totally recommend it to anyone. Jean's experience on becoming an adult and successfully (or unsuccessfully) dealing with life's ups and downs, can easily be compared to almost anyones else's life journey. One thing is for sure: Life, sometimes, has other plans for you and how Jean expresses her emotions and feelings in words, is penetrating.
January 29, 2019
3,8. At some points it bored me a little, but the book grasps everyday city life with feelings of loneliness, sadness, joy and adventure really well. And, it’s often really funny. This book hit close to home as I lost my dad in my twenties too.
October 23, 2019
2.5 Stars
I did not connect with this. In the first part of the book I got watery eyes and I felt close to the writer, not going to lie. And I thought I was really going to appreciate this book but I was wrong.
I could feel the emotion, the pain of having someone you love die especially when you live/are far away from them. However from around mid-book I lost all that. I could not feel for her anymore. She became apathetic towards other people. I guess that could all be blamed on the pain she felt and the series of unfortunate events (the break-ups, the bad apartments, the bad jobs etc.) It just made me sad, I could see the author getting bitter. Jealous for family members, resentment towards them, a crushing loneliness and the idea of being on her own ( a feeling I am sure lots of people can relate to, and I myself am guilty of isolating friends when things get hard because I fear of "bothering them"), bitterness towards the places she lived in, sadness for her love life and anger, regret and so on.
Towards the end we see the ego coming out more and more, "this isn't about you" is used to highlight her pain and how she is suffering alone and it is about her and no one else, period. But it is not, paying more attention I saw how the people around her were suffering too, her mother, her siblings, her doctor? But she made it about her which is natural I understand but it just made me sad. Sad seeing her unable to live her life because of the possibility of death, sad seeing her shutting down other people and not opening to the possibility of a good life. Becoming numb to everything, deciding to do things out of spite for life? e.g. sleeping with strangers even when it's not something she wants to do? I laughed bitterly when she commented on her one night stand saying "is this guy dead inside or what?" because to me, she was too.
I could see her desperately looking for love in everyone except herself, looking for love in everyone but not giving it to anyone. Maybe I am blowing this out of proportion but it really did feel like that.
The last chapter I guess was a bit more heart-warming as we see her spending time with her brother and mother and I saw a softness coming back but overall I was left wanting more. I did not feel connected and I hardly felt compassion for her. When she let her bitterness come through I was annoyed honestly, before connecting that to the pain she must have felt through that time of her life.
Something else I noticed was a review that said "about families, mortality, love and the hard, necessary work of becoming an adult." Wow. If this book is about those things then I completely missed the point. The only thing about families was how distant they all were? And love? I saw no trace, and honestly this book makes becoming an adult like a terribly sad and bitter experience, a continuous fight with yourself and your dreams and how they are never going to come true. Another thing that bothered me were the mentions of sexual harassment from various men as they seemed almost pointless? What I mean is they did not fit within the book, they felt just put there for "relevance", harassment, a pain everyone can relate to? I don't know, the way she told us about them made me cringe.
Now I feel weird commenting on this because it is a memoir and it is someone's life at the end of the day, but I just feel compassion for her and how her life turned out to be because of the constant presence of death in her (mind) life.
I did not connect with this. In the first part of the book I got watery eyes and I felt close to the writer, not going to lie. And I thought I was really going to appreciate this book but I was wrong.
I could feel the emotion, the pain of having someone you love die especially when you live/are far away from them. However from around mid-book I lost all that. I could not feel for her anymore. She became apathetic towards other people. I guess that could all be blamed on the pain she felt and the series of unfortunate events (the break-ups, the bad apartments, the bad jobs etc.) It just made me sad, I could see the author getting bitter. Jealous for family members, resentment towards them, a crushing loneliness and the idea of being on her own ( a feeling I am sure lots of people can relate to, and I myself am guilty of isolating friends when things get hard because I fear of "bothering them"), bitterness towards the places she lived in, sadness for her love life and anger, regret and so on.
Towards the end we see the ego coming out more and more, "this isn't about you" is used to highlight her pain and how she is suffering alone and it is about her and no one else, period. But it is not, paying more attention I saw how the people around her were suffering too, her mother, her siblings, her doctor? But she made it about her which is natural I understand but it just made me sad. Sad seeing her unable to live her life because of the possibility of death, sad seeing her shutting down other people and not opening to the possibility of a good life. Becoming numb to everything, deciding to do things out of spite for life? e.g. sleeping with strangers even when it's not something she wants to do? I laughed bitterly when she commented on her one night stand saying "is this guy dead inside or what?" because to me, she was too.
I could see her desperately looking for love in everyone except herself, looking for love in everyone but not giving it to anyone. Maybe I am blowing this out of proportion but it really did feel like that.
The last chapter I guess was a bit more heart-warming as we see her spending time with her brother and mother and I saw a softness coming back but overall I was left wanting more. I did not feel connected and I hardly felt compassion for her. When she let her bitterness come through I was annoyed honestly, before connecting that to the pain she must have felt through that time of her life.
Something else I noticed was a review that said "about families, mortality, love and the hard, necessary work of becoming an adult." Wow. If this book is about those things then I completely missed the point. The only thing about families was how distant they all were? And love? I saw no trace, and honestly this book makes becoming an adult like a terribly sad and bitter experience, a continuous fight with yourself and your dreams and how they are never going to come true. Another thing that bothered me were the mentions of sexual harassment from various men as they seemed almost pointless? What I mean is they did not fit within the book, they felt just put there for "relevance", harassment, a pain everyone can relate to? I don't know, the way she told us about them made me cringe.
Now I feel weird commenting on this because it is a memoir and it is someone's life at the end of the day, but I just feel compassion for her and how her life turned out to be because of the constant presence of death in her (mind) life.
May 26, 2018
What is remembered is not the same as what is written down,
a memoir is the progression and amplification of the banal,
memoirs die fast, lies linger longer, it is the buyer beware genre.
Memory sanitized is remembrance perverted,
read about an author's suck family?
Brah, I'd rather have my eyes nailed to the wall and wonder why I'm going blind.
James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" (of bullshit),
absolutely killed the memoir - truth equals not memoir,
"Why are you writing a memoir, you're so young?" She has no answer. Exactly.
The memoir genre in one sentence: White lies morph and are made black and twisted.
Memoirs painted by numbers: brother/sister a drug-bug
cancer the sell-all, gold standard,
author experiences an Epiphany.
Memoir as slum, filthy with liars,
staged past happenings,
life events culled via hypnosis, false memory declarations.
A memoir author is on a mission
and it doesn't involve the reader,
memoir writing is closest to diary-dead-reading.
Chris Roberts, God in Pieces
a memoir is the progression and amplification of the banal,
memoirs die fast, lies linger longer, it is the buyer beware genre.
Memory sanitized is remembrance perverted,
read about an author's suck family?
Brah, I'd rather have my eyes nailed to the wall and wonder why I'm going blind.
James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" (of bullshit),
absolutely killed the memoir - truth equals not memoir,
"Why are you writing a memoir, you're so young?" She has no answer. Exactly.
The memoir genre in one sentence: White lies morph and are made black and twisted.
Memoirs painted by numbers: brother/sister a drug-bug
cancer the sell-all, gold standard,
author experiences an Epiphany.
Memoir as slum, filthy with liars,
staged past happenings,
life events culled via hypnosis, false memory declarations.
A memoir author is on a mission
and it doesn't involve the reader,
memoir writing is closest to diary-dead-reading.
Chris Roberts, God in Pieces
May 17, 2023
Enjoyable and easy to listen to, Jean has a nice voice
April 25, 2020
I wanted this to be more about what it feels like to live in different countries and to resettle. Most of the chapter about that part felt like lists. The lists weren't bad but I wanted more. Instead this was more about dying, grief, and cancer. Which is fine. Just not what I was hoping for. But then- this really wasn't about me.
December 15, 2019
Some powerful writing in here on death, grief, family, sex, work, relationships, friendships - all the things really - but other bits could have been pruned for the greater good. That said, this engaging memoir was never boring or indulgent. It’s probably just me.
October 1, 2019
I had heard a lot about this book and how it was an important book about bereavement. Its very much one young woman's experience of bereavement that causes her to leave Berlin where she was happy and return to New York and the trials and tribulations that this causes her. I did enjoy the writing in places and she did make me laugh, at other times I found it self indulgent and typical of so many other books that seem to be around at the moment, particularly the part about how hard it is to live in London. Given that the author is American, it is perhaps less surprising that she gets funnier when writing about her own country. I'm also not sure that this book would be off use to anyone going through a bereavement, as she doesn't really reflect on that as much as the hype would have you believe.
May 26, 2020
this book was a pretty boring read. at first it got my attention and I could connect with it but I really forced myself to finish it. i do sympathise with the author very much but honestly, I would not recommend.
February 18, 2024
the first half of this was so good and the rest was just okay-ish. this feels like a very honest memoir and all the parts about grief are written so well and relatable, but i also had to roll my eyes SO many times because the author is so stereotypical american (even though she lived in europe for so long!)
July 26, 2018
I’d been subscribed to Jean Hannah Edelstein’s beautifully written newsletter for about a year when I saw her soon-to-be-released memoir available for request on NetGalley, and I jumped at the chance to get my hands on it sooner rather than later.
This Really Isn’t About You tells the story of how, while still in her early thirties, Jean lost her father to cancer—only to learn that she had inherited the same gene that caused it. She writes movingly about the loss of her father, the difficulties of knowing what it is that will one day kill you, and her many encounters with the medical professionals involved in diagnosing and testing her Lynch Syndrome.
But this book is more than that, too. It’s about the importance of family, and how our relationships with them grow and change. It’s about being young and in love, or wanting to be (the chapter on everything Jean loved about London in her twenties will make anyone nostalgic, no matter where they spent that decade). Really, this memoir is a moving and witty account of what it’s like to navigate the highs and lows of adulthood—and how to do it all when life throws you off course.
This Really Isn’t About You tells the story of how, while still in her early thirties, Jean lost her father to cancer—only to learn that she had inherited the same gene that caused it. She writes movingly about the loss of her father, the difficulties of knowing what it is that will one day kill you, and her many encounters with the medical professionals involved in diagnosing and testing her Lynch Syndrome.
But this book is more than that, too. It’s about the importance of family, and how our relationships with them grow and change. It’s about being young and in love, or wanting to be (the chapter on everything Jean loved about London in her twenties will make anyone nostalgic, no matter where they spent that decade). Really, this memoir is a moving and witty account of what it’s like to navigate the highs and lows of adulthood—and how to do it all when life throws you off course.
August 24, 2018
Imagine having lost a beloved parent to cancer....and then finding out that you had inherited the gene that might give you cancer too.
Loss is a great distiller for all of us, and helps us realise what's most important in life. For Jean Hannah Edelstein, she also has to wrestle with her own mortality as well as the rough ocean that is grief. And so she begins an interesting journey, one that many of us can relate to and recognise ourselves in - particularly if you've lived in London during your twenties, I found those sections very moving and relatable! - but one that entails having to face the bigger questions in life much sooner than most of us normally would. Does knowing your fate make living easier...or harder? How do you face the future? We live in a world that suggests to us that we are in control of our lives and our fate....Edelstein's experiences show us that that really isn't the case at all.
"This Really Isn’t About You" is a very special memoir that manages to be courageous and heartbreaking but lighthearted at the same time. Edelstein writes frankly but also with great humour and grace.
Loss is a great distiller for all of us, and helps us realise what's most important in life. For Jean Hannah Edelstein, she also has to wrestle with her own mortality as well as the rough ocean that is grief. And so she begins an interesting journey, one that many of us can relate to and recognise ourselves in - particularly if you've lived in London during your twenties, I found those sections very moving and relatable! - but one that entails having to face the bigger questions in life much sooner than most of us normally would. Does knowing your fate make living easier...or harder? How do you face the future? We live in a world that suggests to us that we are in control of our lives and our fate....Edelstein's experiences show us that that really isn't the case at all.
"This Really Isn’t About You" is a very special memoir that manages to be courageous and heartbreaking but lighthearted at the same time. Edelstein writes frankly but also with great humour and grace.
November 17, 2019
I love reading memoirs, and this one I just kept postponing to read because of the main series of events. Parts of the book made me cry, some parts made me remember my own father-daughter relationship during my childhood-adolescence years, and some parts made me think about my own struggles of my move to a new continent. Those who like to read about or reflect on any of these topics will deeply enjoy this book.
August 23, 2018
Totally engaging memoir. Valiant, vulnerable, funny and immensely likeable. The structure works a deceptive magic of its own. While Edelstein keeps you hooked with the frankness of her style, she weaves past and present together to powerful effect, like a well constructed novel. Recommended.
April 17, 2019
I really did not like this book. The author was not likeable at all.
I did and do feel for what she went and is going through but this is not a book I’d recommend. I wanted to stop reading half half through but thought I’d finish it hoping it would get better, it did not.
I did and do feel for what she went and is going through but this is not a book I’d recommend. I wanted to stop reading half half through but thought I’d finish it hoping it would get better, it did not.
February 22, 2019
Like many other elite white millennials, Jean Hannah Edelstein felt somewhat adrift throughout her twenties and into her early thirties; trying to pursue a career in writing and publishing, she moved between London, Berlin and New York, having few long-term relationships with men and not able to meet traditional ‘adult’ goals. (Edelstein writes interestingly on the changing definitions of adulthood here). There’s a sense in which Edelstein is always neither here nor there; caught between her American upbringing and her many years of living in Britain and Germany, confused by a Jewishness that is signalled clearly by her last name but which, unlike surnames, is not inherited down the male line. However, this familiar kind of memoir is punctuated by two terrible things: Edelstein’s father’s death from lung cancer, and Edelstein’s own discovery that she has inherited Lynch syndrome from him, a genetic mutation that significantly raises her lifetime risk of a number of types of cancer.
Edelstein’s discovery pushes her even further into liminal spaces, especially the doctors’ recommendation that she has a prophylactic hysterectomy and oophorectomy to limit her chances of getting womb and ovarian cancer. But Edelstein wants to have children, and she’s afraid that she won’t feel like a woman any more if she doesn’t have her reproductive organs, even though she’s fully aware that being a woman is not dependent on being able to, or wanting to have, babies. ‘I suspected that it is problematic to be a single woman in your thirties because men assume you are desperate to have children,’ she writes, ‘but even more problematic if you are facing surgery that is going to make that impossible‘. Thankfully, this all has a happy ending: Edelstein’s son, born through IVF to avoid the chance of him inheriting Lynch syndrome, was born at the end of 2018.
This Really Isn’t About You is cleverly structured – Edelstein starts with her diagnosis, flashes back to the way she lived her life before, then ends with the aftermath – and very well-written. The memoir is lifted above similar offerings such as Meg Fee’s Places I Stopped On The Way Home not just because of its subject-matter but because of the specificity of Edelstein’s observations. Her memories of her father avoid generic emotion and are incredibly touching; ‘On Sunday mornings my father made us all pancakes for breakfast, including ones without eggs and milk for my brother, who was allergic to eggs and milk, and including one pancake for the dog… [He] once developed a failsafe method for making Jell-O, using the microwave. During the course of its development he produced so much Jell-O… that he started giving it away to the neighbours. The neighbours seemed a little surprised to receive the gift of Jell-O. My father thought it was a fine gift.’ As someone who spent five years of her childhood in Washington DC then moved back to Britain, I also appreciated Edelstein’s transatlantic observations from the other direction. This is very true: ‘I would start feeling sorry for my cousins [in Scotland] who were trapped in a place where it rained for so many days in the summer and where, in the late 80s, there seemed to be only four television channels and two flavours of ice cream: vanilla, which was sliced from a brick, and rum & raisin, which was disgusting.’
I’d love to see This Really Isn’t About You advance to the Wellcome Prize shortlist: apart from Jessie Greengrass’s Sight, it’s my favourite entry so far.
Edelstein’s discovery pushes her even further into liminal spaces, especially the doctors’ recommendation that she has a prophylactic hysterectomy and oophorectomy to limit her chances of getting womb and ovarian cancer. But Edelstein wants to have children, and she’s afraid that she won’t feel like a woman any more if she doesn’t have her reproductive organs, even though she’s fully aware that being a woman is not dependent on being able to, or wanting to have, babies. ‘I suspected that it is problematic to be a single woman in your thirties because men assume you are desperate to have children,’ she writes, ‘but even more problematic if you are facing surgery that is going to make that impossible‘. Thankfully, this all has a happy ending: Edelstein’s son, born through IVF to avoid the chance of him inheriting Lynch syndrome, was born at the end of 2018.
This Really Isn’t About You is cleverly structured – Edelstein starts with her diagnosis, flashes back to the way she lived her life before, then ends with the aftermath – and very well-written. The memoir is lifted above similar offerings such as Meg Fee’s Places I Stopped On The Way Home not just because of its subject-matter but because of the specificity of Edelstein’s observations. Her memories of her father avoid generic emotion and are incredibly touching; ‘On Sunday mornings my father made us all pancakes for breakfast, including ones without eggs and milk for my brother, who was allergic to eggs and milk, and including one pancake for the dog… [He] once developed a failsafe method for making Jell-O, using the microwave. During the course of its development he produced so much Jell-O… that he started giving it away to the neighbours. The neighbours seemed a little surprised to receive the gift of Jell-O. My father thought it was a fine gift.’ As someone who spent five years of her childhood in Washington DC then moved back to Britain, I also appreciated Edelstein’s transatlantic observations from the other direction. This is very true: ‘I would start feeling sorry for my cousins [in Scotland] who were trapped in a place where it rained for so many days in the summer and where, in the late 80s, there seemed to be only four television channels and two flavours of ice cream: vanilla, which was sliced from a brick, and rum & raisin, which was disgusting.’
I’d love to see This Really Isn’t About You advance to the Wellcome Prize shortlist: apart from Jessie Greengrass’s Sight, it’s my favourite entry so far.
January 18, 2021
For me, the three-star rating comes down to an issue of marketing. Based on the blurb and title, I anticipated a coming-home journey centred around a father-daughter relationship, grief and loss and growth, and the inevitable necessity of putting your international life aside to return to America for reasons bigger than yourself (and the culture shock that comes with that).
So I was disappointed that this was more a detailed account of the author's own movements, thoughts, relationships and flings, living situations, and the procurement of a dog. It's a fine memoir, and the writing is wry and at times very funny, but because my expectations were for transcendence and a journey to selflessness at an age when it's easy to crave independence, I was disappointed and even frustrated. Like other reviewers, I'd anticipated the phrase "This really isn't about you" to be a selfless truth, not an indignant one.
If I'd been the editor, I would have suggested breaking the book into short essays: moving home and the strangeness that comes with that, life/dating in Brooklyn, the horrible loss (and that list of lovely memories about her father), her own diagnosis, her experiences as a patient (I thought these were brilliant), cleaning out the house with her mother, etc. etc. This format, for me, would have created more space for seemingly untethered elements like, e.g., the dog. I did struggle to understand how sexual assault at a holiday party related to the focus of this particular narrative, which brings me to my second editorial suggestion: I would have billed this book as a coming-of-age story, a la Dolly Alderton, and thereby cast a wider net for experiences that didn't necessarily relate to her father or the transatlantic adjustment. If my expectations had been different, I would have enjoyed the book more.
Huge admiration for her writing style and wit and humour. And the narrative handling of such delicate and difficult topics made those sections deeply moving and accessible. But I had to work to convince myself to finish it. Mostly because I felt continuously wound up that a book called 'This Really Isn't About You" was really about her.
So I was disappointed that this was more a detailed account of the author's own movements, thoughts, relationships and flings, living situations, and the procurement of a dog. It's a fine memoir, and the writing is wry and at times very funny, but because my expectations were for transcendence and a journey to selflessness at an age when it's easy to crave independence, I was disappointed and even frustrated. Like other reviewers, I'd anticipated the phrase "This really isn't about you" to be a selfless truth, not an indignant one.
If I'd been the editor, I would have suggested breaking the book into short essays: moving home and the strangeness that comes with that, life/dating in Brooklyn, the horrible loss (and that list of lovely memories about her father), her own diagnosis, her experiences as a patient (I thought these were brilliant), cleaning out the house with her mother, etc. etc. This format, for me, would have created more space for seemingly untethered elements like, e.g., the dog. I did struggle to understand how sexual assault at a holiday party related to the focus of this particular narrative, which brings me to my second editorial suggestion: I would have billed this book as a coming-of-age story, a la Dolly Alderton, and thereby cast a wider net for experiences that didn't necessarily relate to her father or the transatlantic adjustment. If my expectations had been different, I would have enjoyed the book more.
Huge admiration for her writing style and wit and humour. And the narrative handling of such delicate and difficult topics made those sections deeply moving and accessible. But I had to work to convince myself to finish it. Mostly because I felt continuously wound up that a book called 'This Really Isn't About You" was really about her.
November 13, 2020
TW/CW: cancer, death of a parent, mentions of suicide thoughts and suicide ideation, death of a loved one, mentions of assisted suicide, sexual assault and harassment in the workplace.
I’m writing this review minutes after I finished listening to the audiobook (read by the author) on Storytel. I usually don’t write reviews as soon as I finish reading a book, I let my thoughts simmer for a few days and then I start writing, but this book that got me out of a months long slump moved me so much that I don’t need a few days to get my thoughts in order.
I’ve had this memoir on my TBR for quite a long time, I think someone recommended it on Bookstagram and I thought this sounds like the kind of memoir I’d enjoy reading.
I’m not going to write a lot about me in this review but a few people in my family passed away or had cancer, cancer has always been a very present topic/issue in my life, I’m incredibly passionate about prevention and cancer research and I try to stay on top of checking my body as much as possible because I’m scared it might genetically run in my family.
So I picked this book for that reason as well, I wanted to know what someone who knows they have the gene that makes it more likely they’ll get cancer lives with that kind of knowledge, how they manage it and what they do with that kind of diagnosis.
This book definitely delivered, it pulled all of the emotions out of me, I was sad and hopeful and worried and everything in between. I deeply enjoyed her writing style and even more hearing her reading it. The structure of the book made a lot of sense, starting at the pivotal moment of her dad’s passing and going backwards through the previous ten years of her life and the fasting forward to her own diagnosis.
Her honesty, bluntness and ability to capture exactly what real life sometimes is made this a brilliant memoir.
I’m writing this review minutes after I finished listening to the audiobook (read by the author) on Storytel. I usually don’t write reviews as soon as I finish reading a book, I let my thoughts simmer for a few days and then I start writing, but this book that got me out of a months long slump moved me so much that I don’t need a few days to get my thoughts in order.
I’ve had this memoir on my TBR for quite a long time, I think someone recommended it on Bookstagram and I thought this sounds like the kind of memoir I’d enjoy reading.
I’m not going to write a lot about me in this review but a few people in my family passed away or had cancer, cancer has always been a very present topic/issue in my life, I’m incredibly passionate about prevention and cancer research and I try to stay on top of checking my body as much as possible because I’m scared it might genetically run in my family.
So I picked this book for that reason as well, I wanted to know what someone who knows they have the gene that makes it more likely they’ll get cancer lives with that kind of knowledge, how they manage it and what they do with that kind of diagnosis.
This book definitely delivered, it pulled all of the emotions out of me, I was sad and hopeful and worried and everything in between. I deeply enjoyed her writing style and even more hearing her reading it. The structure of the book made a lot of sense, starting at the pivotal moment of her dad’s passing and going backwards through the previous ten years of her life and the fasting forward to her own diagnosis.
Her honesty, bluntness and ability to capture exactly what real life sometimes is made this a brilliant memoir.
January 3, 2021
The structure of this book sounds odd when written down - it starts at "Between", which details Edelstein's father's diagnosis, her move to New York and his sudden death. It ends with her subsequent diagnosis with Lynch syndrome, inherited from her father and which increases her risk of cancer. We then go back a decade or so with Edelstein's move to London. From the very intense, intimate time of her father's dying, we move to stories of the challenges of being young and poor in a big city you don't know all that well. But family are still very much present here, with Edelstein considering the challenges of distance and the conflicting motivations for moving away.
I love the writing on relationships, where Edelstein's surety in her sense of self really shines through; it's not a barrage of awkward, cringey moments like these things can tend to be. And the chapters about shitty jobs with abusive managers and colleagues are really well done - they're infuriating to read and must have been difficult to write.
Edelstein talks of there being so many paths open to you at this age, and the paralysing fear of choosing the wrong one. Of course later on, with her father's early passing and her diagnosis, it might feel like her path was set from the start. The slow evolution of coming to terms with this new reality is really well done, mapped out in actions and thought. There's no epiphanies, no sudden Hollywood-esque changes of perspective or realisations, and I admire how Edelstein captures the bumpy and non-linear recovery from loss and tragedy. This is a touching and human exploration of family and identity; a reflection on loss and transition that doesn't strain to deliver profound insight, and is all the better for it.
I love the writing on relationships, where Edelstein's surety in her sense of self really shines through; it's not a barrage of awkward, cringey moments like these things can tend to be. And the chapters about shitty jobs with abusive managers and colleagues are really well done - they're infuriating to read and must have been difficult to write.
Edelstein talks of there being so many paths open to you at this age, and the paralysing fear of choosing the wrong one. Of course later on, with her father's early passing and her diagnosis, it might feel like her path was set from the start. The slow evolution of coming to terms with this new reality is really well done, mapped out in actions and thought. There's no epiphanies, no sudden Hollywood-esque changes of perspective or realisations, and I admire how Edelstein captures the bumpy and non-linear recovery from loss and tragedy. This is a touching and human exploration of family and identity; a reflection on loss and transition that doesn't strain to deliver profound insight, and is all the better for it.
February 14, 2020
A pleasant short-ish memoir that covers the author’s life through her twenties and thirties. A lot of ground is covered here, often quite casually; much of it is a kind of blur of travel, living in different cities and working all kinds of editorial and publishing jobs. It’s not always glamorous, but it is always something, most of the time. It feels wholesome even when it’s insubstantial. Certainly it was enough to make me feel like I’ve done little with my life by comparison.
It is a sad story. There are specific sadnesses: the loss of a father to cancer, and the diagnosis of a genetic condition that renders one highly susceptible to similar cancers. And there are other kinds of sadness: a precarious existence, somewhat rootless, drifting. There is a strange sort of loneliness about the book — strange not because it is unusual — but strange only because it comes from an apparent contradiction. There’s plenty of people in these pages. There are friends and boyfriends and family. There are other names on every page. But there’s a sort of distance between the reader and them.
The distance is a product of style, and the style is the main attraction here. Every line is good to be around. It’s deceptively light, even when it’s heavy. It is balanced. It’s not exactly minimalist but it’s easy on the adjectives. It’s deft, wry, and often quite funny. But you wouldn’t call it a ‘tell all’ memoir, nor does it feel especially ‘intimate’; by today’s standards it feels relatively discreet. It feels modest, contained. It feels careful and thoughtful and considerate. All of these are good things.
It is a sad story. There are specific sadnesses: the loss of a father to cancer, and the diagnosis of a genetic condition that renders one highly susceptible to similar cancers. And there are other kinds of sadness: a precarious existence, somewhat rootless, drifting. There is a strange sort of loneliness about the book — strange not because it is unusual — but strange only because it comes from an apparent contradiction. There’s plenty of people in these pages. There are friends and boyfriends and family. There are other names on every page. But there’s a sort of distance between the reader and them.
The distance is a product of style, and the style is the main attraction here. Every line is good to be around. It’s deceptively light, even when it’s heavy. It is balanced. It’s not exactly minimalist but it’s easy on the adjectives. It’s deft, wry, and often quite funny. But you wouldn’t call it a ‘tell all’ memoir, nor does it feel especially ‘intimate’; by today’s standards it feels relatively discreet. It feels modest, contained. It feels careful and thoughtful and considerate. All of these are good things.
September 21, 2020
A truthful working through of loss and grief, for a father but also for oneself. I found so many moments in this touching little book to connect deeply with, especially the idea that the death of someone so significant as a father absolutely changes and redefines the path of your life. In Jean’s case, that’s in a specific, medical sense through her new diagnosis of Lynch syndrome, but also through the more broad effects of moving homes, reflecting on personal history and transformed familial relationships.
One of my favourite, tiny quotes is when Jean utters a “Dad-like” phrase:
“It was a joke Dad would have made, if he had been there. But if he was there, if he was still alive, we’d be somewhere else.” Pg. 256
Through death we learn to access new parts of ourselves, we take on new roles (to fill the gaps left by the dead) and connect in new ways to the people around us. We often end up finding ways to keep that lost person near and active in our collective lives but, inevitably, the mere act of stepping into that new role marks the unavoidable truth that that loved one is not, will never more be, with us themselves.
Thank you Jean x
One of my favourite, tiny quotes is when Jean utters a “Dad-like” phrase:
“It was a joke Dad would have made, if he had been there. But if he was there, if he was still alive, we’d be somewhere else.” Pg. 256
Through death we learn to access new parts of ourselves, we take on new roles (to fill the gaps left by the dead) and connect in new ways to the people around us. We often end up finding ways to keep that lost person near and active in our collective lives but, inevitably, the mere act of stepping into that new role marks the unavoidable truth that that loved one is not, will never more be, with us themselves.
Thank you Jean x
May 15, 2019
I thought that the title was meant to be understood in an anti-egocentric manner.
I was wrong. The only time the sentence is used is when the author means that this is not about you, you meaning some other person, because it is about her.
So now we know that the novel is about the author. It is about her experience of losing her dad and living through the aftermath. I think the novel is meant to cause the reader to relate to her experience, the human condition and reflect and one's own life and memories in the process. There indeed were passages that I really enjoyed and some that moved me, but overall I did not enjoy it. It was boring and more like a simple recounting of events than a stimulation of reflection.
I also am not sure about the author‘s reading of the audiobook. On the one hand I loved that it actually was her voice that tells her story and her monotonous reading often matched her style of jokes which helped in delivering them. But other times it was too much for the normal reading style. A rather mixed bag.
I was wrong. The only time the sentence is used is when the author means that this is not about you, you meaning some other person, because it is about her.
So now we know that the novel is about the author. It is about her experience of losing her dad and living through the aftermath. I think the novel is meant to cause the reader to relate to her experience, the human condition and reflect and one's own life and memories in the process. There indeed were passages that I really enjoyed and some that moved me, but overall I did not enjoy it. It was boring and more like a simple recounting of events than a stimulation of reflection.
I also am not sure about the author‘s reading of the audiobook. On the one hand I loved that it actually was her voice that tells her story and her monotonous reading often matched her style of jokes which helped in delivering them. But other times it was too much for the normal reading style. A rather mixed bag.
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