In a market flooded with self-help books, Devrie Donalson’s excellently titled “You’re Gonna Die Alone (& Other Excellent News)” (Blackstone) stands out.
“You may think it’s a trite, unimportant, vacant collection of barely-thoughts from a tragic, narcissistic web clown,” she writes of this collection of non-public stories designed to deal with a wide selection of issues and emotions.
“You may very possibly be right. But there’s a likelihood you may find it helpful, too.”
A social media star with 750,000 followers on TikTok, Donalson quit her job as a florist in California in 2012 and moved to Scotland, aged 29, intent on constructing a latest life.
She also desired to lose her virginity.
Despite an excellent academic record and a successful profession, she still considered herself a failure, at the least when it got here to sex (or lack of it).
She finally did the deed with a tall, half-Scottish, half-Irish man (“like whenever you get a swirl cone because you may’t choose from your two favorite flavors, but, like, man version,” she writes).
Even in difficult moments, she manages to seek out humor.
Within the chapter “Scotland, Grief & the Vibrator in my Grandma’s Garage,” for instance, Donalson laments her grandmother’s death as she clears her belongings.
“The things we pack away wait for us to come back back to them, unchanging while we stock on being human,” she writes.
“We gather stories and heartbreaks, wins and losses, and we show up in garages as very different people than we were after we last decided what we thought was precious enough to save lots of. Sometimes we discover love and old friends and really low cost vibrators. Sometimes we discover complicated, coiled grief.”
From Tinder and tattoos to rejection and healing, Donalson’s remarkable journey of discovery reveals a girl who has broken freed from the bags that had been weighing her down for therefore long.
“In spite of everything the time I’d spent suffocating my ambition to remain in a safer lane, attempting to secure the love and approval of people that mattered to me, and failing, I’d made a call: I might bet on myself,” she writes.
“And f–k me, it worked.”
