Book No. 97 of 2020
I was pleasantly surprised by how much enjoyment and insight I got out of a book about awkwardness; it turns out that the cringey embarrassed feeling we get in social situations is connected to a lot of deeper aspects of how our brains are wired and how we perceive ourselves. (This book was so insightful, as a matter of fact, that I would recommend it to anyone who suffers from even mild social anxiety, people who worry over how they’re perceived at work, and anyone generally working on themselves or curious about how our brains work.)
Dahl blends her personal experience with awkward situations and cringey feelings (and doing personal experiments with intentionally awkward situations) with scholarly research on human emotions and neurology, and explained what she’s learned in very approachable language sprinkled with pop culture references. (It should be no surprise that The Office and 30 Rock are cited.)
I learned way more than I bargained for on the different types of empathy there are and what role they play in our lives, as well as how our brains are wired to perceive ourselves. There are, helpfully, a lot of tips on how to handle feelings of awkwardness (including those moments where an embarrassing memory seizes you out of nowhere).
The book goes so far as to explore the role that awkward feelings play in American political polarization (particularly on the subject of racism) in a chapter that felt uncomfortably relevant in 2020, and touches on the uniquely American feeling of being acutely embarrassed by how the US was perceived on the world stage after 2016.
Similar Reads
I was surprised that Cringeworthy picks up on some of the same themes in my last read, Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing.
For a different angle on how our internal language affects our self-perception, I recommend Lauren Collins’ When in French.
Updated: For further dives into the world of awkwardness, I’d team this up with Jessica Pan’s Sorry I’m Late, I Didn’t Want to Come and Alexandra Petri’s A Field Guide to Awkward Silences.