‘The best living essayist writing in English’ John Gray

What does it mean to ‘get a life’ in a culture in which there is so much to want?

And why do the lives we think we need so often fail to satisfy?

With his characteristic curiosity, warmth and perceptiveness, Adam Phillips addresses one of the key perplexities of modern life, which is that we are all the products of the families or social groups we grow up in: they shape us selectively and guide us to their preferred ways of living; but we then spend our lives haunted by the aspects of ourselves that they have ignored.

We conform and yet we rebel. So, the lives we want for ourselves are likely to be a difficult mixture of the all too familiar and the experimental. And, necessarily, we all must make things up as we go along.

What is to be done? The answer, Adam Phillips suggests, is to pay especially close attention to what interests us, excites us and frightens us; to make an experiment of living; and thereby to discover the life we want – and whether it is viable.

‘One of the finest prose stylists in the language, an Emerson of our time’ John Banville