#105 The Ugly Thoughts of Hello Beautiful
A Review of Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano
cover photo by Joan Naidorf
My friend Oprah recommended Ann Napolitano’s book Hello Beautiful to me and I finished it while on vacation in October. Oprah is not actually my pal but I have known her for years and it kind of feels like she is my friend. I have enjoyed quite a few of her book recommendations over the years.
She often chooses a certain kind of book I which the main character must overcome abuse or mental illness while on their lyrical journey of self-discovery. In this book, it is a whole family who must navigate what feels like more than their share of illness and injury during their respective lifetimes.
Another friend loved it because of the complex sisterly bonds shared by the story’s Padavano sisters. I wanted to see, for myself, if this book lives up to the hype. It does but, as a reader, I felt more than a little manipulated by the extreme world views displayed by many of the characters. I enjoyed this novel quite a bit, but the experience of reading Hello Beautiful made me appreciate why so many people stick to non-fiction.
The characters in the book suffer from many of the thought distortions that I write about in my non-fiction book about the difficult interactions that physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals have with some of their patients. Let me explain.
Many of the character personalize around the events and circumstances of their life. They take too much blame or responsibility for bad outcomes or other people’s emotions when there is no objective reason to do so. Just because a parent will not or cannot express love or give attention to a child one should not conclude that he or she is unlovable or unworthy.
Understandably, it is difficult to parse this out as a child, but as one grows to adulthood, one could potentially figure it out. One of the main characters is born into a highly dysfunctional family and sadly, he takes on all responsibility for the actions of the adults around him.
Another tremendous thought error of Napolitano’s characters is massive all or nothing thinking. They couch their decisions as if there are only two choices. Everything is either black or white. There exists not even one shade of gray. If you do not hew to the one plan or choice they offer, they either exit or cut people out of their lives. They are parsimonious with their forgiveness as well.
The characters are also people pleasers of the highest order. They look to other people to validate their own decisions in foolish quests to control other people’s emotions. The daughters twist themselves into knots to please their mother. Until they come to understand this fool’s errand, they lose their own essence and become boring numskulls. Discovering the fallacy of people pleasing is certainly one of the major underlying themes of the book.
One of the most the cruel gimmicks of this novel is occurrence of simultaneous miracles and tragedies. What makes this circumstance worse is that many of the characters discount serendipity and point to causation, not correlation. They believe that if both A and B occurred at the same time, A must have caused B. When one person has a car accident on a night they are driving to a party, they seem to think the invitation caused the accident.
I do not understand why so many clever and immensely talented authors use gimmicks so frequently. Gimmicks make for useful plot devices but I find them superfluous. To tie up a lush, multi-generational, story with a compelling plot, relevant social commentary, and lots of meaningful messages, surprise plot twists and stunts just do not seem necessary.
If I sound a little catty about this very popular novel that made the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2023, you are not wrong. Perhaps I need to open some of the dozens of non-fictions that appear monthly on the Kindle account that I share with my spouse.
I love fiction and I embrace the words of Abraham Verghese from another blockbuster 2023 novel, the Covenant of Water. He writes,
“Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth about how the world lives!”
My review of that book is under construction and will be published in a few months.
Do pick up and read Hello Beautiful. Be ready to enter the world of some lovely, multi-dimensional, characters with many thoughts which are not beautiful. We can learn some valuable lessons from them. I think that is why we enter the complex world of fiction in the first place.
