Wanting Badly: A Mostly True Book About Desire and Its Mistakes
In 2008, the author's aunt mailed him The Secret and a rose quartz crystal the size of a toddler's fist. His father, an electrician, slid the book under the short leg of a workbench, where it kept a surface true for nine years. This book is the third answer.
Wanting Badly is a mostly true story about desire and its mistakes: a band paid in quesadillas, an $8,100 boat that taught one question, a restaurant that died through no fault of its owner, a rowing machine wearing slacks, and the year none of the ideas worked when it mattered most. It is a funny book about wanting intensely and incompetently at the same time, written by someone who spent a decade building a framework for reading desire, and then had to test it on his own life, where the results were mixed, hilarious, and occasionally expensive.
Underneath the comedy is one serious repair. Every bestseller about wanting implies that outcomes follow alignment, which sounds empowering right up until the diagnosis, the layoff, the pandemic. This book keeps a door those books do not have: the world's door, the one that was never yours, the one where other people and plain chance get a vote. And it hands you the sentence for the day that door closes, the sentence the author has tested at bedsides and postmortems:
The no was not a message.
For readers of Oliver Burkeman, and for anyone who has ever alphabetized a garage instead of sending the email.
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