David is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Party Girl, a semi-autobiographical tale about a celebrity journalist who falls victim to a world of drugs, alcohol, and sex, which leads to her self-destruction before she finally finds sobriety. While Party Girl may have been classified as fiction, How to Get Successful by F*cking Up Your Life is 100 percent authentic.
In David's latest book, she shares essays that document her struggles with addiction and her journey to recovery. The essays, which are brutally honest and oftentimes laugh-out-loud hilarious, are grouped into three sections: What It Was Like [Pre-Sobriety]; What Happened [Early Sobriety]; and What It’s Like Now [Today]. This format allows the reader to ride along and witness first-hand the progress David made on her road to sobriety (potholes and all). And while the essays alone make this book highly entertaining and educational, David goes a step further and includes a value-added twist to the end of each one.
Personally, I think the "Lesson Learned" feature that appears after each essay is the absolute best part of How to Get Successful by F*cking Up Your Life. This is where David shines the brightest, taking the frequently negative experiences of her addiction/recovery journey and reframing them into a positive lesson that she, and others, can use to improve life going forward.
For example, in the essay entitled "What Addiction Sounded Like," David talks about how cocaine, the drug that once kept the party going all night long for her, had betrayed her. "It made me unable to do anything but sit in front of my computer and shake," she reveals. And while sitting in front of her computer, trying to write, the computer would emit an annoying "BEEP!" every 60 seconds. "I lived in fear of the beep," David confesses. "It somehow symbolized just how bad things were." At the end of the essay, David shares her lesson learned--“Remember the Bad Times (So You Don’t Repeat Them)”--and provides the reader with some insightful words of wisdom.
Anna David is a gifted, intelligent, funny writer, and this collection of essays shows us that a person can make mistakes in life--BIG mistakes--and still find success and contentment. As she says in the Introduction, David hasn't followed "the typical paths. But at this point in my life I can honestly say I feel successful on all levels…not just with what I’ve achieved but with how I feel about what I’ve achieved, not to mention how I feel about what I haven’t achieved." That’s not a bad place to be, and I'm guessing most people would be incredibly happy to feel the same way. Reading How to Get Successful by F*cking Up Your Life might just help them get there.
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| Anna David (photo from her Facebook page) |
