I usually begin a review by typing the title of the book into my laptop. In this case, I typed: Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and ... and I knew there was a third thing, I just couldn’t remember what it was. I picked up the book again and looked at the title. Finding Joy —that was it.
Joy: the word seemed counter-intuitive, disingenuous even, for a book about grief. That was why I couldn’t remember it.
And then, a stray memory: When my mother died nine years ago, after a long illness borne with courage and grace, my first son was just a toddler. What do you say to a toddler about death? We told him that Paati (maternal grandmother) had gone to the star. Months later, after we finished reading a bedtime picture book about astronauts and outer space, he said sleepily that when he grew up, he would build a rocket “with sofas inside, so that everyone can sit, and then we can go and visit Paati on her star.”
Bittersweet; but there it was, that third thing. That moment of joy.
Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant Penguin Random House ₹599
Sheryl Sandberg’s second book, co-authored with Wharton professor Adam Grant, is a manual for recovering from grief. Except that, as everyone who has experienced grief knows, there is no manual for this. The only thing possible is to get through it. Some writers, like Joan Didion and Cheryl Strayed, write deeply felt memoirs of despair; others, like Sandberg, write about what the data says. Both have their place in the sub-genre of writing about life’s most universal condition.
Written after the sudden death of Sandberg’s husband, tech entrepreneur Dave Goldberg, during a trip to Mexico, the book was born out of a Facebook post that she wrote after the funeral. After she posted it, she received a million responses, many of which shared their own stories of loss, and she felt less isolated.
Healing together
If her 2013 bestseller, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead —a book that grew out of a TED talk—was a glossy, relentless exhortation to women to march into the boardroom and sit at the table, Option B is more compassionate about everything that can go wrong on the way. “Lean in? I could barely stand up,” acknowledges Sandberg wryly. With candour, she writes about the need to talk without tiptoeing around difficult subjects. She discusses psychologist Martin Seligman’s theory of the three Ps: personalisation (blaming yourself); pervasiveness (believing that failure in one thing means failure in everything); and permanence (believing that things will never get better). She also refers to Swiss-American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief, described in the classic On Death and Dying (1969): denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
With luminous examples, she talks about the possibility of post-traumatic growth: the grieving parents who work to help other children; the refugee mother who lives to give her children a future. Movingly, in the passages that describe how she and her own young children coped with the tragedy, Sandberg talks about ‘taking things back’: not remaining wounded and cut off from the things their father loved, such as a certain colour in a board game, or playing poker, but including those things in their lives again, and healing together as a family.
The title of the book itself comes from such a response: when she is mourning Dave’s absence, a friend tells her: “Option A is not available. So let’s just kick the shit out of Option B.”
Option B is written in the style of self-help books, with a pithy lesson in each chapter, an optimistic tone, and packed with anecdotes about others who have suffered unimaginable loss but somehow found ways to get on with hope and without bitterness. A couple whose children were killed by the nanny, who set up a non-profit to help other kids. A nine-year-old child who, with his siblings, was abandoned by their drug addict mother in a hotel room, who finds happiness with a foster family. A co-worker who went through treatment for cancer, to whom Sandberg gave a necklace with YGT inscribed on it: ‘You’ve Got This’.
The thing is, everyone who’s faced loss actually does have YGT inscribed on their hearts: You’ve Got This. Loss comes into everyone’s life, in some form or the other, and everyone picks up the pieces in their own way, and not necessarily in the form of Facebook posts. Some of us have the advantages of supportive family, a network of friends, financial security. Others face far greater struggles: along with loneliness, health issues, financial insecurity, or as in the case of millions of refugees today, the loss of everything that they call home.
Living again
Which is why I don’t curl my lip at self-help books. Not everyone has support systems, family, friends, other forms of privilege. If nothing else, self-help books tell readers that others have been in similar situations; they aren’t alone. Self-help books exist on bookstore shelves not because people are foolish and gullible, but because they are vulnerable, facing struggles that others may never imagine, and looking for ways to get through tough times—on the way to finding joy again.
Another stray memory. This week, I’ve been trying to KonMari my children’s wardrobes following the method of decluttering guru Marie Kondo. After tossing a whole bunch of too-small football jerseys and track pants into the giveaway pile, I chanced upon a bunch of baby jabalas that my kids had used as infants. Pale pastels, in lilac, peach and sky blue. In the last weeks of her illness, even as she struggled to breathe, my mother had sent my father to Matunga to buy these cotton jabalas for her little grandsons. With trembling fingers darkened by chemotherapy and radiation, she had threaded the needle over and over and embroidered a wonderland into the fabric: here a white rabbit looking at a clock, there a green parrot sitting on a bough, on another, a tiny brown deer in the forest.
Keep only the things that give you joy, says the KonMari method. I kept the baby jabalas , to remind the boys about their grandmother. It was the elusive, almost-forgotten, all-important third thing. The moment of joy.
Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience and Finding Joy ; Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant, Penguin Random House, ₹599.
