Broken (in the Best Possible Way)

Jenny Lawson is a humor writer and blogger who has built a career around candid, self-deprecating accounts of her life. Broken (in the best possible way) is her third memoir, following Let's Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy. In it, she chronicles her ongoing battles with depression, anxiety, and a cascade of autoimmune disorders while weaving in comic essays about the absurdities of daily life. The book's central narrative arc follows her experience with a brain stimulation treatment for depression, but it moves freely between serious reflection and wildly digressive humor, structured as a collection of loosely connected essays rather than a linear story.

Lawson opens by addressing the reader with characteristic bluntness, describing the years of writer's block, self-doubt, and isolation that produced the book. She discloses her avoidant personality disorder and imposter syndrome and frames her public identity around shared human failure: She has made a living out of being publicly terrible at adulthood, which invites others to share their own embarrassing stories. She signals early that the book contains serious material about mental illness alongside the comedy, noting that she is still as broken as before but has better stories and a little more insight.

Several early chapters establish Lawson's comedic voice through escalating misadventures. She describes persistent memory problems, which she attributes to attention deficit disorder (ADD), medication side effects, and aging, noting she has forgotten entire vacations and countries she has visited. She recounts six separate incidents of losing shoes while wearing them, a problem she blames on rheumatoid arthritis swelling that stretches her footwear. She narrates a convoluted attempt to buy finger-sized condoms at a drugstore to use as waterproof boots for Dorothy Barker, her papillon, a small dog breed. When Dorothy Barker later develops a veterinary condition requiring intimate grooming, Lawson's attempts to shave the dog with men's grooming clippers go predictably wrong.

The book's first major tonal shift comes in "Rainbow Fire," where Lawson traces her anxiety back to age six. She recalls hiding in a toy box, paralyzed by irrational fear, and describes how her panic at day care was so severe her mother quit her job to take a position at Lawson's school. Years later, while on a book tour, Lawson found herself unable to leave a New York hotel room despite overlooking Times Square. Leaning out the window, she noticed a dandelion-shaped fountain below. Wind carried the mist upward, catching the light to create an enormous rainbow wall visible only from her exact vantage point. No one on the street saw it. Lawson interprets this as a sign that her unusual path, though painful, offers perspectives invisible to those on more conventional routes. The moment did not cure her, but it reminded her she might be exactly where she needed to be.

A chapter framed as an open letter to her health insurance company chronicles years of denied claims, rejected medications, and bureaucratic obstruction. She recounts the company refusing to cover antidepressants during a period when her husband, Victor, had to cut off her internet access after finding her on suicide message boards. When her psychiatrist recommended repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), the insurance company blocked it. Lawson connects the company's denials to the lies depression tells her, noting how devastating it is when a corporate entity echoes the voice that says she does not need help.

The book's longest and most emotionally significant chapter, "The Things We Do to Quiet the Monsters," follows Lawson's TMS treatment in diary form. She opens with two truths she holds simultaneously: She is not suicidal, and she is at risk of suicide. She describes a months-long depression, the worst she has experienced, with only a few functional days per month. TMS sends electromagnetic pulses through the skull to stimulate underactive brain regions linked to depression and calm overactive regions linked to anxiety. More than half of patients with treatment-resistant depression see improvement. After a month of fighting her insurance company, Lawson began daily sessions. By Day 7, she wanted to leave the house voluntarily for the first time in months and wanted to listen to music again, a sign she did not know she had been looking for. By Day 14, she cried in her car after a session, recognizing it as progress because depression had robbed her of the ability to cry. By Day 20, she spent a full day with her daughter, Hailey, shopping and swimming and singing, and ended the day feeling normal rather than depleted. Victor mentioned traveling to Europe, and Lawson surprised everyone by agreeing. On Day 27, Victor asked what would happen if she got better and no longer needed him. Her doctor explained that shifting dynamics between dependent and caregiver can strain relationships and told Lawson that she does not let her pain go to waste, a compliment she carries on dark days.

By her final treatment, Lawson had not achieved full remission, but she had improved significantly, going from operating at roughly 10 to 25 percent to between 60 and 75 percent. Anxiety and agoraphobia improved the most. She creates a personal twelve-step program for maintaining her mental health, including exercise, sunlight, treating herself as she would a beloved pet, and forgiving herself. Six months later, depression returned more frequently, and she called about booster treatments. But in the weeks after treatment ended, she traveled to Europe for the first time, witnessing Hailey's awe at the Eiffel Tower.

Threaded throughout are chapters about Lawson's compounding physical ailments. Her autoimmune disorders trigger each other in cascading attacks: testosterone deficiency, pre-diabetes, and multiple forms of anemia. A tuberculosis diagnosis forced her off her rheumatoid arthritis injections for nine months of difficult treatment, during which crippling joint symptoms returned. She also learns she has Hashimoto's disease, an autoimmune thyroid condition, to which her doctor responds with casual matter-of-factness.

Family history forms another major thread. Lawson traces mental illness and dementia through four generations, from her great-great-grandmother Lillie, who died in a 1950s mental institution with psychosis listed as a contributing factor, to her grandmother, whom she calls Granny, now in a memory care facility. Lawson researches the brutal treatments of that era and reflects that she herself would have been institutionalized not long ago. Granny remains cheerful despite losing herself in pieces, joking that she can check the name written in her underwear to remember who she is. Lawson finds hope in the contrast between Lillie's era and Granny's care, seeing slow but real progress in how mental illness is understood.

The comic essays that alternate with the serious chapters cover subjects ranging from a viral Twitter thread of mortifying social encounters to brainstorming absurd products with friends to accidentally setting her house on fire by neglecting to empty a vacuum collection tank. A chapter about her marriage argues that the secret to lasting love is laziness, laughter, and learning that conflict, resolution, and forgiveness are normal parts of a relationship. She credits Victor's ability to defuse any argument with absurdity.

In one chapter, Lawson's cat knocks over a stone dove that has sat on her table for years, shattering it and revealing a hollow interior filled with white packing material. Victor suggests repairing it with kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken objects with gold-dusted lacquer, treating the damage as part of the object's history rather than something to disguise. In a metaphorical chapter called "Souls," Lawson extends this idea, describing every person as carrying a glowing sphere that cracks over a lifetime. She concludes that the world is a place where people wander barefoot through one another's broken shards, some bleeding and some healing, and that seen in the right light, the brokenness is beautiful.

A bonus chapter addresses the COVID-19 pandemic. Lawson spent over a year in isolation with Victor and Hailey, noting that agoraphobia had inadvertently trained her for lockdown. The chapter closes with the story of Granny's death from COVID in a closed ward where no family could visit. Hours after the family received the call and began making arrangements, Lawson's mother called back: A hospice worker had confused patients, and Granny was still alive. That evening, Granny died for real. The family oscillated between grief, relief, and hysterical laughter over a story Granny would have loved. Lawson closes the book by thanking the reader and expressing hope for carrying forward the compassion the pandemic revealed.