I know, sort of cheesy sounding, but the title was like a challenge: I had to see how well it lived up to 'absolutely everything.' As a reference book, it's quite readable and it does cover a lot: choosing doctors, retirement funds, work, friends, etiquette, dating, dealing with family, home maintenance and repair, and more. Its target audience is the twenty-something recently out of college, but I still found it a useful read.
In addition to lots of basic info on financing, for example, Kirsch also includes reputable links for more information throughout the book as well as a bibliography of further resources.
I read it out of sequence, selecting chapters in order of interest to me. It is the sort of reference book you can pull off your shelf to consult as the need arises. The chapter I put off until last was the one on spirituality, but it turned out to be one of the most interesting to me since it didn't focus heavily on religion and presented a discussion on ethics.
On a two-page spread of quotes from women commenting on their ethical codes, this one particularly struck me:
Live your life as if most mistakes/screw-ups/bad behavior have a statute of limitations of five years. Forgive yourself. We all learn so much in the course of five years. We can't possibly hold our younger, less-experienced selves to the standards we have today.I've heard variations of this before, but it can be so easy to obsess over the past that those other words rarely sank in before I was beating myself up for something again. That may be true with these words as well, but the idea of a five year statute of limitations really appeals to me. It may at least help confine that internal scrutiny to more recent events.
One year ago at TTaT: Dude
tags: books, The Girl's Guide to Absolutely Everything, Melissa Kirsch
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