Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    How Did I Get Here?: Making Peace with the Road Not Taken
    Unavailable
    How Did I Get Here?: Making Peace with the Road Not Taken
    Unavailable
    How Did I Get Here?: Making Peace with the Road Not Taken
    Ebook270 pages5 hours

    How Did I Get Here?: Making Peace with the Road Not Taken

    By Jesse Browner

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A literary exploration that asks seeks to answer the question: Have I lived the life I intended?

    Jesse Browner, a novelist with a full-time job at the United Nations, has written a book reminiscent of the Talking Heads classic song "Once in a Lifetime." Based on an essay he wrote for Poets and Writers Magazine, Browner asks hard questions about life choices, about the tendency to believe there is a parallel life that might have been more fulfilling or more free. He wonders: Is the true artist made by single-minded devotion to his craft? Do we compromise our dreams in service to responsibilities to family and jobs?

    These questions prompted Browner to take a hard look at himself and the evolution that brought him to this moment of existential doubt. In How Did I Get Here? he divides his adult life into five distinct phases—ambition, love, work, fulfillment, and serenity. Sketching portraits of himself at every stage, he looks for idiosyncrasies, commonalities, and clues—signposts that lead him to today. He also draws on the lives of others, from Franz Kafka to his sister to indie rocker Elliott Smith, in search of understanding. What he finds in his courageous quest is bravely honest and inspiring, touching on what it means to live a life with intention and meaning.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJun 30, 2015
    ISBN9780062275721
    Unavailable
    How Did I Get Here?: Making Peace with the Road Not Taken
    Author

    Jesse Browner

    Jesse Browner is a writer and translator who lives in New York. He is the author of the novels Conglomeros (1992) and Turnaway (1996), and of The Duchess Who Wouldn't Sit Down, a widely praised history of hospitality in Western civilization. He has been a contributor to the New York Times Book Review, Food and Wine magazine, Nest magazine, New York magazine, and others.

    Read more from Jesse Browner

    Related to How Did I Get Here?

    Related ebooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      In Memory of Stanley Cavell

      Jun 21, 2018

      In Memory of Stanley Cavell
      4 min read

    • Article

      The Darkness Within

      Dec 13, 2017

      LAST summer I wrote a review of Who Is Rich? (Random House, 2017) by Matthew Klam. The novel is narrated by a man named Rich Fischer, a self-loathing husband and father who conducts an anguished and antic affair with an equally unhappy infidel. Short

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Darkness Within

      Dec 5, 2017

      LAST summer I wrote a review of Who Is Rich? (Random House, 2017) by Matthew Klam. The novel is narrated by a man named Rich Fischer, a self-loathing husband and father who conducts an anguished and antic affair with an equally unhappy infidel. Short

      7 min read

    • Article

      True Stories

      Feb 25, 2023

      True Stories
      8 min read

    • Article

      True Stories

      Feb 25, 2023

      True Stories
      8 min read

    • Article

      An Archaeological Inquest

      Sep 1, 2022

      An Archaeological Inquest
      7 min read

    • Article

      Hernan Diaz: ‘If Ever I Find Myself On The Page, I View It As An Immense Failure’

      Jul 8, 2023

      Hernan Diaz, 50, was born in Buenos Aires and lives in Brooklyn. A finalist in 2018 for the Pulitzer prize in fiction with his debut In the Distance, which the New Yorker called “an offbeat western”, he is the joint winner of this year’s award – toge

      4 min read

    • Article

      A Lifelong Habit of Being

      Jun 1, 2020

      DAYS AFTER THE 9/11 attacks, Susan Sontag noted the frequency with which the hijackers were being charged with cowardice: “[W]hatever may be said of the perpetrators of Tuesday’s slaughter,” she insisted in The New Yorker, “they were not cowards.” So

      4 min read

    • Article

      The Art of Poetry No. 111

      Sep 6, 2022

      The Art of Poetry No. 111
      26 min read

    • Article

      From the Editor

      Jul 29, 2019

      From the Editor
      5 min read

    • Article

      On Writing Poems Facing Into The Broken World

      Mar 1, 2020

      Kaveh Akbar and Jane Hirshfield have been in a running e-mail conversation since January 2016, when Akbar first contacted Hirshfield about doing an interview in his Divedapper series, before his first, widely acclaimed book, Calling a Wolf a Wolf (Al

      16 min read

    • Article

      You Can’t Make It Up

      Mar 25, 2021

      You Can’t Make It Up
      9 min read

    • Article

      Reactions

      Apr 13, 2022

      Feedback from readers Books sometimes speak to each other in a kind of question-and-answer. My 1980s transnational quest novel, Go Home (Knut House, 2016), reclaims the xenophobic taunt and repurposes it. The opening paragraph of Go Home poses the re

      3 min read

    • Article

      Why Write Fiction in 2017?

      Dec 12, 2017

      Why Write Fiction in 2017?
      7 min read

    • Article

      Writing Queer

      Dec 27, 2018

      Ididn’t know it, but I was mentally ill until about age 16. Anybody queer was considered “mentally ill” until 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association removed the diagnosis of homosexuality as a disorder (though “sexual orientation disturbance

      8 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Delia Cai

      Dec 1, 2022

      Delia Cai reflects on 2022 through the books she read. The post A Year in Reading: Delia Cai appeared first on The Millions.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Beyond “Survival Of The Fittest”

      Oct 15, 2021

      If you learned about Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory in school, most likely it was presented as a straightforward explanation for how species have evolved to become what they are today. Individuals with different traits competed, and the stronge

      4 min read

    • Article

      An Interview With Bianca Stone

      May 1, 2023

      An Interview With Bianca Stone
      11 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Anne K. Yoder

      Dec 12, 2021

      Reading Levy helped me envision a way to write myself again into existence, to remake a home and a life, to visualize it as the adventure I was thrust into. The post A Year in Reading: Anne K. Yoder appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    Reviews for How Did I Get Here?

    4/5

    1 rating0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words