How The Book Happened & What It's Going to Do For You (Or Die Trying)
Starred reviews from Publisher's Weekly and Library JournalIn 2002, Melissa Kirsch was toiling as an editor for a women's media company. Every week, reviewer's copies books would arrive on her desk, each marketed squarely at her. These glittering tomes had witty titles and flashy covers that promised to explain how to snare a man, how to order a cocktail, how to land that corner office before turning 30. Bored to distraction by these books that proffered little more than retrograde flirting tactics and shopworn clichés, Melissa wearied of saying "I could do this so much better" and decided it was time she did.
What began with an innocent email query: "What do you know now that you wish you'd known right after college and in your 20s that would have made your life a lot less difficult, spared you heartache, generally made the transition to life on your own a heck of a lot easier?", sent to all the women Melissa knew, turned into a four-year odyssey of researching and interviewing and writing, resulting in the 500 pages of required reading for the so-called "quarterlife crisis": The Girl's Guide to Absolutely Everything.
Drawing on the wisdom she gleaned from her panel of sixty wise, hilarious, brilliant women who lived to tell, plus her own experience and the know-how of physicians, psychotherapists, a nutritionist, sex advice experts, a practitioner of Chinese Medicine, a real estate agent, an image consultant and lots of women's moms, Melissa put together a colossal cheat sheet to a woman's 20s and 30s.
Forget the tired, you-go-girl trifles of advice books of the past. The Girl's Guide to Absolutely Everything is just that—it's smart, it's funny, it covers the essentials of wedding gift etiquette and tells you how to unclog a toilet. It's practical and it's riotously entertaining. It's the perfect book for any woman about to graduate college, strike out on her own, change jobs, turn 30, dump that snake-in-the-grass, move to a new city, or who's just looking for some encouragement or guidance that she can't get from Wikipedia or Our Bodies, Ourselves. Your 20s are so often treated as the waiting room for the rest of your life. Why should you wither away in anticipation of real life beginning? To hell with putting Baby in a corner—you've got a lot of living to do.
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From the cover
A colossal cheat sheet for your post-college years. Finally, all the needs of the modern girl—from the benefits of a Roth IRA to the pleasure and pain of dating, from figuring out what to wear to a job interview to the delicate enterprise of defriending—are addressed in one indispensable volume. Here is the perfect combination of solid advice and been-there secrets on every one of life's conundrums you might confront, all delivered in Melissa Kirsch's fresh, personal, funny voice, as if your best and smartest friend were giving you the best and smartest advice in the world.