I sent my flatmate four screenshots of this in one evening

okay so. I read this because Steph left it on the coffee table in what I chose to read as a pointed manner, and then I finished it in about five days and sent her four screenshots in one evening, so the joke is on me, clearly.

first thing: I'm not an introvert. I am extremely not. I talk to people in queues. I have been described (by my ex, affectionately, I think) as "a lot before ten in the morning". so I went in braced to be told off for eight hours and instead got something much more interesting, which is a proper explanation of what has been going on for the other half of every room I've been in.

the bit that got me first is the whole business about the extrovert ideal and when it actually happened. she goes back and looks at how the culture flipped from valuing character to valuing personality, roughly when people started moving to cities and having to make an impression on strangers instead of neighbours, and once you can see it you cannot unsee it. every job ad. every school report I ever got. every group project of my entire life. "confident communicator." mate that's a personality trait, not a skill.

the business school chapter is genuinely funny in a horrifying way. everyone talks constantly because not talking gets scored as not participating, so the whole room ends up performing certainty about things nobody has read. I have been in that meeting!! I have BEEN in it. I laughed and then felt awful because I am almost certainly one of the people making that room worse.

there's a chapter about high-reactive babies that I have thought about roughly every day since. the idea that the ones who flinch at the mobile over the cot turn into the ones who feel everything more later on, not weaker, just turned up louder. and my mum has told me a hundred times that I was a screamer and my brother slept through everything, and now he's the one who won't answer a phone call. no because that tracks.

what I liked most is that she doesn't do the thing I was dreading, which is spend the whole book telling extroverts that we're shallow. she is careful about it when it must have been so tempting not to be, given the book is essentially a defence brief. she keeps saying it's about fit and not about superiority and she means it. she gives a whole section to quiet people who can do the loud thing brilliantly when it's for something they care about, and what it costs them afterwards, and I went and apologised to Steph for the New Year's thing (2023) (she said she'd forgotten) (she had not forgotten).

things I'd take off: the pop-science creaks. it's endless "researchers found" followed by a study with about forty undergraduates in it, and the book doesn't always distinguish between a solid finding and a nice story somebody told her at a conference. the negotiating-tips chapter feels bolted on from a different and much worse book. and it's very American — the offices, the schools, the summer camps — none of which quite translates here, where our version of all this is the same thing but more passive aggressive about it.

but honestly? nine. because I have changed actual behaviour off the back of it, which basically never happens with a book like this. I stopped filling silences. I let people finish their sentence even when I can see where it's going. I asked Steph if she wanted to come to the thing instead of assuming, and she said no, and it was FINE, and a year ago I'd have treated that as a personal referendum on our friendship.

my ex would have hated this book and I've thought about why and it's because he was the loudest man in every room and had built his entire self on that being a virtue. anyway. not relevant. moving on!

read it if you live with somebody quiet and have ever felt slightly rejected by them. read it especially if you're the loud one. Biscuit is an extrovert and I say that with the full weight of the evidence behind me, he greets bins.