Anna Quindlen Geneen Roth Martha Beck Share Hard Won Wisdom in New B
Anna Quindlen, Geneen Roth, Martha Beck Share Hard-Won Wisdom in New B... Books
Turning letters from vicious critics and humiliating gaffes from her awkward teen years into fodder for a zinger-filled best-seller? Wise indeed. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) by Joan Didion ...
Nestled among her famous essays about California in the 1960s, Didion also directed her searing gaze inward. "On Keeping a Notebook" provides some of the best reasons ever written for committing your thoughts to paper (or screen!) at day's end. Gift from the Sea (1955) by Anne Morrow Lindbergh ...
Lindbergh penned this slim classic during a vacation with her family on Florida's Captiva Island. She muses on the importance of finding solitude and minimizing the worldly distractions that keep us from doing what we love. After forcibly joining the 99 percent, Roth realizes that she has the same way she once mishandled food. (Roth has counseled compulsive eaters for more than 30 years, and she herself has gone through stages from bulimic to obese.) "Our relationships to both substances," she writes, "are expressions of unconscious beliefs, family messages, outdated convictions, and painful memories that most of us would rather walk on burning coals than examine." Does bingeing on chunky cookies differ all that much from blowing a wad on designer sunglasses? Not really, says Roth. Both are attempts to fill an inner void — and neither one works. Nor does hoarding money, nor depriving your body of nutrition for the sake of looking five pounds thinner at your high school reunion. Indeed, says Roth, the only way to get comfortable with our finances is to candidly assess what spending means to us. No matter how little we may have, she concludes, . Next: Another writer — life coach Martha Beck, author of Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want — urges women to abandon their 9-to-5 work culture and follow a less conventional, . Pursue this alt-route far enough, she insists, and you might even be able to make a living from it. Beck melds the practices of ancient healers with the principles of modern science to create physical and mental exercises designed to help you imagine a new vocation based on your true nature and then implement a life plan. See also: To convince those who might accuse her of peddling "woo woo" (her term), Beck cites stories of fellow "wayfinders," as she calls them, who have blazed a trail from traditional career path to more gratifying livelihood: training service dogs, healing victims of PTSD, running a cartoon website — you get the idea. Beck "didn't choose life coaching as a career," she remarks at one point in Finding Your Way. "I wanted to be something more prestigious, like a professor, a convenience store clerk, or a crack addict." Her openness to new adventures turns out to be the wisest lesson in the book. You may also like: Carol Kaufmann is a freelance writer and editor in Alexandria, Va. Her latest book, Safari (Workman), will be published in the fall. Featured AARP Member Benefits See more Entertainment offers > See more Entertainment offers > See more Entertainment offers > See more Entertainment offers > Cancel You are leaving AARP.org and going to the website of our trusted provider. The provider’s terms, conditions and policies apply. Please return to AARP.org to learn more about other benefits. Your email address is now confirmed. You'll start receiving the latest news, benefits, events, and programs related to AARP's mission to empower people to choose how they live as they age. You can also by updating your account at anytime. You will be asked to register or log in. Cancel Offer Details Disclosures
A Word or 2 From 3 Wise Women
Life lessons saving money and saving the world
We seem to be swimming in unsolicited advice these days: Websites, pipelines, friends, colleagues and even insist they know just what we need to get our lives together at last. Is there a grain of truth amid all that chattering chaff? To find out, we scoured the wisdom landscape and came up with three books by wise women of the global village. See if what they have to say hits you where you live. See also: Anna Quindlen's newspaper and magazine columns have long offered boomers wise advice. Now that she's approaching 60 and tackling the Big Themes of this life stage, her wisdom is doubly well-earned — and equally applicable. Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, her latest nonfiction work, is a compendium of ideas her older fans will find compelling. Calling this time of life "poised between the inevitable and the possible," Quindlen savors her female friendships ("what we women have in addition to, or in lieu of, therapists"). She sees as the ultimate "pay-it-forward endeavor" but worries that are becoming the "older women we once discounted." Quindlen isn't the only wise woman to share her knowledge — and heartbreak — in a recent book. In Lost and Found: One Woman's Story of Losing Her Money and Finding Her Life, Geneen Roth writes about life after she and her husband saw their savings vanish in the perpetrated by Bernard Madoff (referred to here, understandably, as "B.M."). One day the best-selling author is expanding her sweater collection; the next, she can't pay the mortgage.More Wise Gals
Bossypants (2011) by Tina Fey ...Turning letters from vicious critics and humiliating gaffes from her awkward teen years into fodder for a zinger-filled best-seller? Wise indeed. Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968) by Joan Didion ...
Nestled among her famous essays about California in the 1960s, Didion also directed her searing gaze inward. "On Keeping a Notebook" provides some of the best reasons ever written for committing your thoughts to paper (or screen!) at day's end. Gift from the Sea (1955) by Anne Morrow Lindbergh ...
Lindbergh penned this slim classic during a vacation with her family on Florida's Captiva Island. She muses on the importance of finding solitude and minimizing the worldly distractions that keep us from doing what we love. After forcibly joining the 99 percent, Roth realizes that she has the same way she once mishandled food. (Roth has counseled compulsive eaters for more than 30 years, and she herself has gone through stages from bulimic to obese.) "Our relationships to both substances," she writes, "are expressions of unconscious beliefs, family messages, outdated convictions, and painful memories that most of us would rather walk on burning coals than examine." Does bingeing on chunky cookies differ all that much from blowing a wad on designer sunglasses? Not really, says Roth. Both are attempts to fill an inner void — and neither one works. Nor does hoarding money, nor depriving your body of nutrition for the sake of looking five pounds thinner at your high school reunion. Indeed, says Roth, the only way to get comfortable with our finances is to candidly assess what spending means to us. No matter how little we may have, she concludes, . Next: Another writer — life coach Martha Beck, author of Finding Your Way in a Wild New World: Reclaim Your True Nature to Create the Life You Want — urges women to abandon their 9-to-5 work culture and follow a less conventional, . Pursue this alt-route far enough, she insists, and you might even be able to make a living from it. Beck melds the practices of ancient healers with the principles of modern science to create physical and mental exercises designed to help you imagine a new vocation based on your true nature and then implement a life plan. See also: To convince those who might accuse her of peddling "woo woo" (her term), Beck cites stories of fellow "wayfinders," as she calls them, who have blazed a trail from traditional career path to more gratifying livelihood: training service dogs, healing victims of PTSD, running a cartoon website — you get the idea. Beck "didn't choose life coaching as a career," she remarks at one point in Finding Your Way. "I wanted to be something more prestigious, like a professor, a convenience store clerk, or a crack addict." Her openness to new adventures turns out to be the wisest lesson in the book. You may also like: Carol Kaufmann is a freelance writer and editor in Alexandria, Va. Her latest book, Safari (Workman), will be published in the fall. Featured AARP Member Benefits See more Entertainment offers > See more Entertainment offers > See more Entertainment offers > See more Entertainment offers > Cancel You are leaving AARP.org and going to the website of our trusted provider. The provider’s terms, conditions and policies apply. Please return to AARP.org to learn more about other benefits. Your email address is now confirmed. You'll start receiving the latest news, benefits, events, and programs related to AARP's mission to empower people to choose how they live as they age. You can also by updating your account at anytime. You will be asked to register or log in. Cancel Offer Details Disclosures