We Can Do Hard Things

Glennon Doyle says she wakes up most mornings having forgotten what she knows. She is almost fifty and has worked through a great deal, yet the same questions keep circling back: why am I like this, how do I work out what I want, how do I know what to do, am I doing any of this right? The harder life gets, the harder those hard-won answers are to find. We Can Do Hard Things is her attempt, with her wife Abby Wambach and her sister Amanda Doyle, to build the guidebook that people need for the journey of being alive.

The project began in a brutal year. Glennon was diagnosed with anorexia, Amanda with breast cancer, and Abby lost her beloved brother. For the first time, the three people who usually steered one another were all lost together. They did what had always helped before and turned to honest, searching conversation with people they trusted.

Those conversations grew into a wider question, put to each other, to close friends and to 118 other thinkers, writers and artists: you have walked these roads of marriage, parenting, work, recovery, heartbreak, aging and new beginnings, so what have you learned that might help someone else find the way? Contributors include Brandi Carlile, Elizabeth Gilbert, Roxane Gay, Cheryl Strayed, Esther Perel, Jane Fonda, Ina Garten, Ocean Vuong and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, among many others.

Two ideas run through what they gathered. Whatever road you are on, someone has crossed that ground before you, and what they learned can light your path. The book collects that shared wisdom in one place, for the moments when you feel clueless or alone, need some clarity in the chaos, or simply want good company along the way.