Imperfect Control
Our Lifelong Struggles With Power and Surrender
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
In her remarkable national bestseller, Necessary Losses, Judith Viorst explored how we are shaped by the various losses we experience throughout our lives. Now, in her wise and perceptive new book, Imperfect Control, she shows us how our sense of self and all our important relationships are colored by our struggles over control: over wanting it and taking it, loving it and fearing it, and figuring out when the time has come to surrender it.
Writing with compassion, acute psychological insight, and a touch of her trademark humor, Viorst invites us to contemplate the limits and possibilities of our control. She shows us how our lives can be shaped by our actions and our choices. She reminds us, too, that we sometimes should choose to let go. And she encourages us to find our own best balance between power and surrender.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A few years ago Viorst published Necessary Losses, an inquiry into facing loss and death. Her new book, which her publisher calls a sequel (she herself doesn't make that claim), continues in much the same spirit as she examines the somewhat fuzzily defined matter of control (e.g., self-control, control of the events in one's life, control of others). Beginning with questions of heredity and continuing on to the final acceptance of death, she touches on "our lifelong struggles as children and parents, lovers and workers, victims and survivors." Her style combines lecture-hall breeziness with a near-anthology of quotations from sources that range from T. Berry Brazelton to Freud in a Calvinist-like approach to free will: though we might not have it, we have to live as though we did and be responsible for our acts. She points out that a key element in any question of control is knowing when to surrender the illusion of it so we don't go crazy with self-blame. Her advice can be abstract to a fault or downright practical: sign health-care proxies and durable power-of-attorney agreements now. Partly because of its far-flung theme, the volume, while scattered with helpful insight, is a bit unwieldy.
