Michael Rosen is a poet and writer. In Getting Better he has written a semi autographical book about times in his life which have been difficult and how he has coped. He hopes, I think, to pass some of his wisdom gained through suffering on to the rest of us but you need to be clear from the beginning that this is not a self-help book with guaranteed strategies that you can apply to your own situation. It is written more like a conversation with friends and includes poems that the author has written about the things that have happened to him and how he feels about them.
The book includes what we might think of as minor struggles, such as being unhappy in his job, to bigger issues such as the death of his son, his own near death from Covid (see here for a review of the book he wrote about this experience) and his lifelong chronic illness. I think that this probably mirrors people’s own experiences, although we will not all have had to live through everything that the author shares here.
I like this approach to autobiography and life. I enjoyed the fact that this was, at its heart, an uplifting narrative of how we can come through loss and struggle and emerge from them changed but not destroyed. I thought that the chapters about the death of his son were particularly poignant and his efforts to understand what has happened echo very much what we all feel at times of sudden loss. The poems were also interesting and although I am not going to dash off a verse every time that anything difficult happens to me I can see how useful they are to this writer for him to express his feelings.
This is a short but meaningful book which I am pleased that I read.
Anne Is Reading 