Lose Yourself
in a Good Book

My husband and I recently hit a major milestone: ten years of marriage. To celebrate a decade of love, laughter, growth, and (let’s be honest) a lot of daily life logistics, we decided to go on a second honeymoon. We packed our bags and headed to a beautiful, all-inclusive resort. No cooking, no cleaning, no schedules, no alarms. Just paradise. I expected to immediately melt into a state of total, blissful relaxation. But instead, something unexpected happened.

f you pick up Building a Life Worth Living expecting the gripping, highly stylized, and often chaotic narrative arc of a typical mental health memoir (like Kiera Van Gelder’s The Buddha and the Borderline) you might find yourself shifting gears pretty quickly. Where other memoirs in this niche lean heavily into the "entertainment" value of severe psychological distress, Marsha Linehan offers something profoundly different: a masterclass in radical acceptance, delivered with t

The first half of Kiera Van Gelder’s memoir is a raw, agonizing, and deeply necessary look into the chaos of BPD. Van Gelder doesn't hold back. She captures the intense emotional volatility, the desperate longing for connection, and the agonizing friction of navigating a mental health system that often treats BPD patients like lost causes. If the entire book had maintained the vulnerability and pacing of those early chapters, this would easily be a 4 or 5-star read.