Focusing on some of the best-known characters in all of literature--chosen to trace the arc from childhood to old age--a brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature shows how our inner lives become at once stranger and more familiar when seen through the prism of fiction.
In supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual profession, Josh Cohen illuminates a new way to understand ourselves. He helps us see what Lewis Carroll's Alice or Harper Lee's Scout Finch can teach us about childhood. He delineates the mysteries of education instanced in Jane Eyre or Sandy Stranger in The Prime of Miss Jane Brody; the need for adolescent rebellion dramatized by John Grimes in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and Ruth in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. He makes clear what Goethe's Young Werther and Sally Rooney's Frances have in common, or not, as they experience first love; how Jay Gatsby helps us to understand ambition, Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke the vicissitudes of marriage, and Mrs. Dalloway the inexorability of disappointment. As for old age and death, he explores what wisdom we may glean from John Ames in Marilynn Robinson's Gilead or Don Fabrizio in Giuseppe di Lampedusa's The Leopard.
From maddening jealousy to unbearable grief, from transcendent love to bottomless hatred, How to Live, What to Do invites us to ponder deep questions about the human experience--about the ties that bind us all.