Self Care with Leigh Stein
“Self-care” means simply “the practice of taking action to preserve or improve one’s own health.” But moving past its denotation and into its many—and frequently ambivalent—connotations, self-care becomes a more fraught and considerably less straightforward term. Leigh Stein’s second novel, Self Care, examines the ambiguities inherent in its title concept. Delivering a hilarious and scathing satire on the toxicity and contradictions of contemporary wellness culture and commodified feminism.
Leigh Stein on This Naked Mind
This year, I got sober curious (now there’s a wellness catchphrase for you) and started looking at my relationship with alcohol, using Annie Grace’s Naked Mind (2015) technique. I used to believe that alcohol was how I de-stressed, but it was actually causing me a lot of stress. I was never a binge drinker, and I didn’t get hangovers. Wine was a nightly habit and I felt an uncomfortable tug of war between the part of me that wanted to cut back and the part of me that insisted, You deserve a treat.
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