Buy Yourself the F*cking Lilies

Tara Schuster's memoir and self-help hybrid is organized around the concept of "re-parenting," which she defines as figuring out what nurturing you still need and then giving it to yourself. The book traces Schuster's transformation from a self-destructive twentysomething into a stable, happy adult through daily rituals she developed to heal her mind, body, and relationships.

The book opens on the morning after Schuster's 25th birthday. She woke up in her New York studio apartment, still in party clothes, with no memory of most of the previous night. On her phone she discovered three voicemails from her therapist, Dr. Goldstein, who had heard Schuster's tearful, desperate drunk-dial and recommended she go to a hospital. Fragments of the night returned: being ditched at her own birthday dinner, dancing alone in a museum until security escorted her out, and alternating between crying and vomiting. Schuster acknowledged a double life of professional competence and private disaster, and declared this was a life she could no longer live.

Schuster provides background on her childhood in Los Angeles. Her parents, a doctor and a lawyer, were rarely home and waged a volatile marriage defined by screaming and public humiliation. Pets died or disappeared from neglect; the house sat on an earthquake-prone foundation with a cracked ceiling threatening collapse. At age eight, Schuster took over the receptionist desk at her mother's gynecology office, believing it was her job to fix her parents' lives. Her mother repeatedly told her she was dyslexic but never pursued a medical evaluation, leaving Schuster to internalize the message that she was fundamentally defective.

The early chapters focus on the mental habits Schuster built. She recounts advice Jon Stewart gave during her internship at The Daily Show: There are no big breaks, only tiny ones, and the key is to work hardest at every small opportunity. She applied this by obsessively maintaining the coffee machine Stewart used after rehearsals, a dedication that helped her land a job at Comedy Central. She resolved to bring the same persistence to healing her mind.

At 25, Schuster was regularly weeping at her cubicle with no understanding of where her pain originated. Her best friend Isabelle suggested she read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, and Schuster began the book's "Morning Pages" practice: three pages of stream-of-consciousness writing every morning. As a child, she had kept a journal, but a family friend gave it to her mother, who threatened to use it in divorce proceedings as evidence that her 12-year-old daughter was a liar. That betrayal had caused Schuster to stop writing altogether. The Morning Pages gradually surfaced deep fears and buried memories, and the journal became a space for processing trauma and articulating dreams she had never allowed herself to have.

Schuster confronts her dependence on marijuana, tracing it to her parents' divorce. When she discovered her father smoked nightly and asked him to stop, he replied that she should not make him choose between the weed and her. This rejection prompted her to start smoking from his stash. Her parents split their two children without consulting them: Schuster went to live with her father, while her younger sister Diana stayed with their mother. Months into her journaling practice, Schuster froze while reaching for her pipe and confronted a pivotal realization: If she smoked away the feeling, she would never truly know herself. She threw her pipe in the trash, covered it with yogurt, and flushed her weed down the toilet.

Without marijuana to numb her, Schuster experienced the full force of her anxiety. Her college friend Julia suggested running. Despite a lifetime of avoiding physical activity, Schuster began with tiny goals and discovered that running broke up the anxiety in her chest and the harsh thought loops in her head. Exercise became a nonnegotiable daily practice. Six months later, while visiting Isabelle's family in Maine, Isabelle's cousin Eliza introduced her to a daily gratitude list. Schuster's early entries were grudging, but surprising items gradually emerged: strangers smiling at her, her health, her friends. She maintained the practice for nine years, writing over 32,000 items. Through her journal she also identified a vicious internal voice she named the "Frenemy Within," traced it to her mother's relentless criticism, and wrote the voice a cease-and-desist letter addressing each accusation with evidence to the contrary.

The chapter "Buy the Fucking Lilies" examines Schuster's fraught relationship with money and self-worth. The book's defining image finds her at Trader Joe's, agonizing over seven-dollar lilies, unable to decide she is worth a small pleasure. About a year and a half into her rituals, a phrase surfaced in her journal that marked a turning point: "Life is not a series of crises to be endured. Life is to be enjoyed" (110).

The body-focused chapters begin when Schuster, longing to return to Los Angeles and determined to build new physical routines, engineers a transfer to Comedy Central's West Coast office to work on Key & Peele. Living with her roommate Lauren, she observed Lauren's grooming rituals and recognized the void left by her own estranged mother, who never taught her beauty practices. Modeling herself on Cleopatra, Schuster created a morning ritual of music, incense, makeup, perfume, and affirmations. On a trip to a hot spring in Hakone, Japan, with her friend Fisch, she bathed naked for the first time, discovering that her nakedness simply did not matter. She curated her physical space with treasured objects, created a home office as a sanctuary for writing, and developed mindful habits around drinking and nutrition. In a flashback to her college graduation in 2008, she describes how a psychiatrist diagnosed her with clinical depression and anxiety and prescribed medication that provided enough stability to begin building other coping strategies.

After failing to complete a hike at Runyon Canyon, Schuster began hiking alone with incremental goals. On a Sunday hike at Temescal Canyon with her friend Hilly, she achieved a moment of full presence, and actress Anjelica Huston passed by, stopped, smiled, and nodded. Schuster interprets this as confirmation that expanding what you believe you are capable of is what makes you truly capable.

The relationship-focused chapters open at a meditation studio where a teacher asked the class to recall a moment of unconditional love. Schuster searched her memory and could not find one, realizing her deepest wound was that she had never felt worthy of unconditional acceptance. She describes building a chosen family she calls her "Lady Harem," a circle of deeply committed friends. She also uncovers a repeating romantic pattern: finding someone impressive on paper but in emotional crisis, getting invested too quickly, becoming someone she is not, then growing resentful when the relationship collapses. She traces this to her childhood, where her mother's screaming counted as "love" because it meant she wanted Schuster to do better, and her father's inattention counted as "love" because it meant he trusted her. Pressured by coupled friends and coworkers who questioned her singleness, she dated Danny, a finance executive she knew from the first date was wrong for her, for nine months before ending the relationship deliberately. She also repaired her bond with Diana, who told her honestly that the constant apologizing and unsolicited advice were hurtful. After a week-long retreat in New York, the sisters laid the foundation for a new relationship.

The emotional center of the book arrives when Schuster's father nearly died. At 29, she picked him up for dinner and realized he could not form words. Doctors diagnosed a subdural hematoma, a brain bleed requiring emergency surgery. Alone in the ER, Schuster signed documents, researched the medical team, and mobilized her entire friend network. When a friend's father arrived at five A.M. and told her she had already done everything right, she realized the adult she had always been waiting for was herself. During recovery, her father teared up while sharing a Mel Brooks song, and Schuster had a transformative realization: His failures as a parent were not personal. He simply did not have the capacity to treat her differently.

The book closes with Schuster's solo trip to Paris at 31. She tallied nearly 6 years of journaling, over 21,000 gratitude entries, and a transformed mind and body. She visited Chanel's original store to fulfill a longtime dream of buying a classic quilted flap bag. When her Frenemy Within tried to derail the purchase, she told the voice out loud to leave, bought the bag, and walked to the Ritz, where she sat at a table for two, one chair for her, one for her bag, embodying the self-possessed woman she had spent years becoming. Schuster frames the bag as a talisman of survival and transformation. Referencing Bronnie Ware's The Top Five Regrets of the Dying, she asks readers to identify their own version of Paris, their own bag, their own lilies, whatever symbolizes the life they are ready to claim.