Powerful and inspirational memoir on mental health, relationships, self-care and writing. If you too have felt that you didn't fit in, this is the book for you.

I find her writing so moving and absolutely powerful in its emotion.

Lidia Yuknavitch writes like a righteous angry angel sent to empower all scared and angry girls. Everything she writes speaks directly to my heart and this book is no exception. It is always a little frightening and beautiful when someone is able to express the sorrow and anger that you spend so much time trying to hide. This is a short quick read but her personal stories of loss, failures and accomplishments in the face of adversity and self sabotage will reverberate for readers long afterward.

"When did we forget that we are not the stories we tell ourselves?"

I admire Lidia Yuknavitch: for her honesty, her brilliance, her resilience and for her genius way of writing. Having just finished The Chronology of Water I couldn't not read this. This book does exactly what it says on the tin: It is a manifesto for/ about misfits. Lidia Yuknavitch uses her own experience as well as the experiences of fellow misfits to paint a picture of what being a misfit can mean and what we all can learn from them. She makes a powerful statement on the importance of art and of channeling pain into something greater. She shows how she has found a place in the world, after many many a detour. She shows the

I think, the main problem for me was that I read it so shortly after the masterpiece that was The Chronology of Water. That book just blew my mind and there was no way a book that is essentially the longform of a TED talk to even come close to its structural brilliance. She also rehashes a lot of that book but in way that creates a narrative - and I thought the strength of her other book was that she did not do that. She told of her life in fragmented, poem-like chapters. This narrative created afterwards feels somehow less true to life.

Still, she can spin beautiful sentences like hardly anybody else and her voice and viewpoint is an important one. I adore that she ultimately arrived in a place of strength and how she uses that strength to try and make the world a better one.

First sentences: "Misfit. Trust me when I say there is a lot packed into that little word."

I received an arc of this book curtesy of NetGalley and Simon & Schuster in exchange for an honest review.

Manifesto for Misfits is a beautifully written, fairly short book that does not follow any kind of classically expositive format. At times, it slips from tjoughtstream tontjpughtstream. Perhaps that's on purpose. It's a book about misfits, but not merely the science fiction reading kid in the back of the lunchroom or the girl who can't make small talk at parties and has out of style clothes on. Here, the misfit focus is much further outside the box - on people who jump completely outside all societal norms, wounded, broken by life's crap like sexual abuse or other things. Like the author's story of having her newborn die and her subsequent pain driving her to let go of everything and end up living under a bridge. This is a book about broken people who can't conform to what society expects and drown themselves in drug addiction sex addiction in all kinds of addictions. The essential message is that there's power and beauty and creativity found by living and seeing from outside normal. On the downside, it does get a bit circular sometimes, repeating themes and ideas.