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Summary
Summary
"I absolutely loved this beautiful book! It's wise, wry, bracingly honest and so gripping I couldn't put it down. Clearly whip smart, Margaux Bergen has one of those rare voices that pulls you in and makes you want to keep reading."
-- Amy Chua, author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother
An inspiring, piercingly honest user's guide to life, written for the author's daughter and given to her on her first day of college, reflecting tough lessons about family, work, and marriage.
You learn a few useful things at school--the three Rs come in handy, and it's good to know how to perform under pressure and wait your turn--but most of what matters, what makes you into a functioning human being, able to hold your own in conversation, find your path, know what to avoid in relationships and secure a meaningful job, no teacher will ever tell you. This diamond-sharp, gut-punchingly honest book of hard-earned wisdom is one mother's effort to equip her daughter for survival in the real world.
Margaux Bergen began writing this book when her daughter Charlotte turned nine and gave it to her right after graduation from high school, when she was setting off for her first day of college. "I am not writing this to groom or guide you to professional or academic success," she writes. "My goal is rather to give you tools that might help you engage with the world and flourish. . . . Think of this as a kind of developing bath-time wisdom."
Wise, heartbreakingly funny, and resonantly true, Navigating Life has invaluable lessons for students of life of all ages. It will challenge you to lead a more meaningful life and to tackle the bumps along the way with grace, grit, style, and ingenuity. What The Blessings of a Skinned Knee did for the early years of parenting, Navigating Life does for the next, far more perilous chapter, when new graduates are cast out on the high seas and have to learn to swim and find their way by themselves.
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With charming candor and insight, Bergen addresses her college-bound daughter, Charlotte, on subjects such as love, friendship, education, and work. The book's eight essays offer advice on facing "the hidden horrors and private joys of adult life": conversation tactics gleaned from friends and cab drivers, the importance of dental care ("This is America and teeth matter"), and impulse control ("learn why you drink"). She discusses career moves and handling prickly employers and sudden terminations with grace before meaningfully recounting her experience with depression and the death of her alcoholic father. Her comments on divorce are wise and sensitive, stressing the value of romantic love despite its risk, "the daily glory of understanding and being understood." Bergen is at her most poignant when describing the fluctuations of intimacy and parental control with a child on the verge of adulthood: "I still watch over you but now you watch me too. I am not used to the scrutiny." Bergen's style belongs to the tradition of Michel de Montaigne, providing guidance through an alchemy of personal reminiscence and thoughts on the general human condition. Her story may not be remarkably exciting, but it is well told and piercing in its honesty. Agent: Stephanie Cabot, Gernert Company. (Aug.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Along with the subtitle and chapters titled Work, Relationships, and Learning, Bergen promises parental wisdom of the sort that is timeless and intergenerational, especially when the introduction begins with a highly personal note to her daughter. What she delivers, on the other hand, reads more like a memoir of her life as a professional woman raising children in the new millennium. Indeed, there are pearls of hard-won perception here, but they are of the kind that can mainly and best be learned via one's own trial-and-error method. Bergen and her children have lived in a unique era under the singular, rarefied influence of Washington, D.C. As such, some of her advice hardly translates universally. Oh, there are worthwhile passages. In the chapter titled My Way, Bergen stresses the importance of clearly articulating and living by one's own code of ethics and not leaving it to church or school to inculcate a moral compass in one's children. But overall, this is a rather uneven parental guidebook-memoir.--Chavez, Donna Copyright 2016 Booklist
