Chatter

Chatter

Adult nonfiction
"I stood in the darkness of my living room, my knuckles white,
my fingers tense around the sticky handle of my Little League baseball
bat, staring out the window into the night, trying desperately to
protect my wife and newborn daughter from a madman I had never met.
Any self-awareness about how this looked, or about what I might
actually do if the madman appeared, had been washed away by the fear I
was experiencing."
Ethan Kross, author of Chatter, received a disturbing and quite
explicit threat letter. It had been sent from a post office very
close to his home. His rational mind was taken over with an obsession
with the danger he perceived his family to be in. He considered
moving and getting a new job. He stood watch at night, the voice in
his head churning out toxic chatter.
You know what chatter is. It's the pesky brain output that
stands in the way of our best intentions (I could never go back to
school), keeps us insecure (I'm much too fat), and can actually
undermine our success (I am so going to bomb that interview). It can
even wreak havoc with our physical and mental health.
And it can be very insidious and sneaky. Kross, himself,
temporarily succombed to it even though he's a scientist and this is
his specialty.
In Chatter Kross distills years of fascinating research for
readers. We learn what these voices consist of and why we have them.
We learn all the ways they can harm us when they get out of control.
The best part of the book is Kross' advice. He doesn't claim to
offer a panacea. Instead he describes a number of techniques we can
utelize to help ourselves and those we love. They cost little to
nothing.
I highly recommend Chatter for anyone who is vexed by or loves
someone who is vexed by those voices. That's basically all of us.
I'm going to end this review by quoting my favorite paragraph
from the book.
"The human mind is one of evolution's greatest creations, not
just because it allowed our species to survive and thrive, but because
despite the inevitable pain that comes with life, it also endowed us
with a voice in our head capable of not only celebrating the best
times but also making meaning out of the worst times. It's this
voice, not the din of chatter, we all should listen to.
On a purrrsonal note, I got an ugly cyst removed. It had kept me from
swimming for years because of a woman alluding to it as a deformity.
So I hid it and avoided swimming. Last October my doctor suggested I
get it biopsies to make sure it wasn't malignant. Recall we were
going into a second spike and there were no vaccines? Oh, hell, no!
This past summer I asked if we could just remove it. So she set me up
for that. The surgeon said she is sure it's benign. Benign is such a
beautiful word. To celebrate I got myself a really cool cat shirt and
journal from Goodwill and two big chocolate bars from Hannaford. (Jules)
Benign is a beautiful word (Tobago).
A great big shout out goes out to the surgeon who did a great job of
removing the deformity.
Tobago and Jules Hathaway


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