On my birthday I was looking for something fun and exciting to do, and while I didn’t come up with anything chart topping I decided to take a trip to the Toronto Women’s Bookstore for the first time. I’ve heard about it in the past but have never been, and since I was coming into a new year in my life I thought it would be productive to do something that has been on my to-do list for too long.

I went with my cousin because we’re both book worms and we’ve always been able to blow through 300+ paged books over a couple days without breaking a sweat since we were little.

As I was looking over the collection of books in the store I found myself looking for books with a “good” story, ones filled with pain and agony, misappropriation and deceit. To me I wanted one that would standout from the rest by having the ability to make me feel slightly unnerved. Besides this task being hard to do, simply because the description on the back was all I had to go on, I ended up thinking to myself, “Why am I so drawn to sad stories full of dark truths? Why is that the kind of book I was looking for?”

After some thinking I came up with this. I’ve realized that I am drawn to sad stories in the same way that I’m drawn to sad songs. There is definitely one thing that I get from it and it’s that they’re truthful, but not just any kind of truth. I feel like its the kind that holds me in place where I can remove the usual mask and feel the emotion. I get the chance to experience something my daily smile never tells, and it actually feels good.

So often we go through life being “fine” when there’s so much more between the letters, no matter how big or small the font, that books that are the complete opposite of that become intriguing and to be honest, quite inspiring for me. It may sound weird to hear it, and possibly slightly morbid but I’m thinking some of you may agree with me.

The book I ended up choosing was Ugly by Constance Briscoe. It’s a true story of the author’s life with her physically and emotionally torturous (abusive is an understatement) mother while she lived in London, England from age 4-17 I believe. I have since finished it so I may be a little off in the time frame, but I have to say that her story has been a motivation for me. She has written her story so candidly that many times my mouth literally dropped open from what I was reading. I HIGHLY recommend reading it because after I finished it made me take a good look at my life. There’s things that she had to live through that NO child should ever have to and still she came out of it way better than expected. To me her fight has truly been amazing. So often it’s books like these that help to push me along and be better over the typical self-help book.

In the end, I found the book with the great story.

Enjoy.

Everything & Anything