How We Are
Published on 4. September 2014
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-0-241-00538-5 (ISBN)
Description
We live in small worlds.
An astonishing literary debut and the first book in the monumental How To Live trilogy, How We Are explores the power of habit and the difficulty of change. A story told in three parts, this profound and ambitious trilogy gets right to the heart of what it means to be human: how we work, how we break, and how we mend.
As Vincent Deary shows us, we live most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of more or less comfortable routine - what he calls Act One. Conscious change requires deliberate effort, and so, for the most part, we avoid it. But inevitably, from within or without, something will come along to disturb our small worlds - some News From Elsewhere. And with ingrained reluctance, we begin the work of adjustment: Act Two.
Over decades of psychotherapeutic work, Deary has been a witness to the theatre of change - the way that ordinary people get stuck, struggle with new circumstances, and eventually transform their lives and get better. He is also keenly aware that novelists, poets, philosophers and theologians have grappled with these experiences for far longer than psychologists have. Drawing on his own personal experience, and a staggering range of literary, philosophical and cultural sources, Deary has produced a mesmerizing and universal portrait of the human condition.
Part psychologist, part philosopher, part novelist, Deary helps us to see how we can resist being mere habit machines, and make our acts and our lives more fully our own.
Vincent Deary is a health psychologist at Northumbria University. This, his first book, is part one of the How To Live trilogy, and will be followed by How We Break (book 2) and How We Mend (book 3).
An astonishing literary debut and the first book in the monumental How To Live trilogy, How We Are explores the power of habit and the difficulty of change. A story told in three parts, this profound and ambitious trilogy gets right to the heart of what it means to be human: how we work, how we break, and how we mend.
As Vincent Deary shows us, we live most of our lives automatically, in small worlds of more or less comfortable routine - what he calls Act One. Conscious change requires deliberate effort, and so, for the most part, we avoid it. But inevitably, from within or without, something will come along to disturb our small worlds - some News From Elsewhere. And with ingrained reluctance, we begin the work of adjustment: Act Two.
Over decades of psychotherapeutic work, Deary has been a witness to the theatre of change - the way that ordinary people get stuck, struggle with new circumstances, and eventually transform their lives and get better. He is also keenly aware that novelists, poets, philosophers and theologians have grappled with these experiences for far longer than psychologists have. Drawing on his own personal experience, and a staggering range of literary, philosophical and cultural sources, Deary has produced a mesmerizing and universal portrait of the human condition.
Part psychologist, part philosopher, part novelist, Deary helps us to see how we can resist being mere habit machines, and make our acts and our lives more fully our own.
Vincent Deary is a health psychologist at Northumbria University. This, his first book, is part one of the How To Live trilogy, and will be followed by How We Break (book 2) and How We Mend (book 3).
Reviews / Votes
This is a book that gets your mind whizzing off in lots of directions... It's crammed with ideas. It makes your head spin, in a good way. -- William Leith * Spectator * Exhilarating... a lyrical, consoling exploration... It takes guts to recognise that change is called for, and more to follow it through. This book - so long as you don't read it on autopilot - should help -- Oliver Burkeman * The Guardian * Fascinating, profound, wonderfully well-observed... [How We Are] could change lives -- Bel Mooney * The Daily Mail * The one self-help book that's actually worth reading * Spectator * An honest, provisional, self-searching voice and a vision rich in images and characters' stories... A trilogy entitled How To Live might easily find itself stranded in the self-help sections of the bookshops. To open the first volume, however, is to realise that this would be an injustice and that any number of other shelves could claim it for themselves * Financial Times * 'Are you living the life you want to lead?' That was the question that one 40-year-old NHS psychotherapist answered by changing his own life in order to write a book that could change yours -- Carole Cadwalladr * Observer * A guidebook for humans * The Journal *More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Penguin Books Ltd
Dimensions
Height: 240 mm
Width: 162 mm
Thickness: 27 mm
Weight
504 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-241-00538-5 (9780241005385)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Vincent Deary is a Health Psychologist at Northumbria University, where his research focuses on the development of new psychosocial interventions for people with a variety of health complaints, including cancer survivors and fear of falling in older adults. As a clinician he works in the UK's first trans-diagnostic Fatigue Clinic, working as part of a multidisciplinary team to research and develop new treatments for people for whom fatigue is a disabling symptom. He is the author of How We Are, the first book in the How to Live trilogy.