cover image Get Over Yourself!: How to Drop the Drama and Claim the Life You Deserve

Get Over Yourself!: How to Drop the Drama and Claim the Life You Deserve

Tonya Pinkins. Hyperion Books, $23.95 (252pp) ISBN 978-1-4013-0176-7

Actress and first time author Pinkins uses religious texts, new age aphorisms and stories from her life in this guide to living a more meaningful and rewarding life. Pinkins writes in a stream of consciousness-esque style that is easy to follow from front to back, but readers who dip in and out of the text will likely find themselves lost, though never far from an affirmative or inspirational nugget: ""Events have the meaning you give them,"" or ""the universe will never give you more to manage than you can handle."" Though some of these tidbits are Pinkins originals, many are culled from sources as varied as the Talmud, Copernicus, Chinese proverbs, Native American and Tibetan Books of the Dead and the head of marketing for the New York Times. Envisioning the book as a manual, Pinkins includes many quizzes, reviews and suggestions for reflective thought alongside overtly illustrative vignettes that reinforce the concepts being taught: ""Gregory's mother left him to live with his grandmother when he was a small boy. He missed her desperately and longed for her all his life; every girlfriend he had seemed to be a repeat of his mother: another treasured woman who would abandon him."" Many of the ideas are empowering if not always new, realistic, or rooted in rationality. (""If the rain is like our blessings and it pours down equally on all of us, good and bad alike, what happens if we block it?"") Readers already in the new age camp may find this worth a look, though the hodgepodge of inspirational wells Pinkins draws on may turn off some readers.