Self-Acceptance

The Body Is Not an Apology

Sonya Renee Taylor · 2018

Taylor’s argument is radical in the literal sense: that self-acceptance has to go all the way down to the body, the thing most of us were taught to treat as a lifelong problem to be fixed. She calls the alternative radical self-love, and makes the case that making peace with your own body is not vanity but a quiet rebellion against everything invested in your dissatisfaction. Bracing, warm and genuinely freeing — especially if the part of yourself you find hardest to accept is the one in the mirror.

Wherever You Go, There You Are

Jon Kabat-Zinn · 1994

The gentlest possible introduction to mindfulness, and really a book about acceptance: meeting this moment, and the self living it, without the endless commentary about how it all should be different. Kabat-Zinn’s short chapters ask very little of you and slowly teach the thing self-acceptance depends on — the ability to notice what is actually here, yourself included, without immediately trying to improve it. A good one to keep by the bed and open at random.

Tiny Beautiful Things

Cheryl Strayed · 2012

A collection of Strayed’s advice column, Dear Sugar, and far wiser and more tender than that sounds. Strangers write in with the hardest things in their lives, and she answers with a fierce, forgiving honesty that keeps arriving at the same place: that you are allowed to be a flawed, half-finished person and still deserving of your own compassion. Read a letter a night. It is like being spoken to kindly by someone who has also been to the bottom of it.

The House on Mango Street

Sandra Cisneros · 1984

Esperanza grows up in a Chicago barrio half-ashamed of her house, her name, her street, and slowly learns to claim all of it as hers. Told in short, luminous vignettes you could read in an afternoon, it is about the particular work of accepting where you come from without being trapped by it — of becoming yourself without disowning the girl you were. Quietly one of the great books about making peace with your own story.

My Name Is Lucy Barton

Elizabeth Strout · 2016

Lucy, recovering in a hospital bed, is visited by the mother she is estranged from, and across their careful, halting conversation a whole life of poverty, shame and self-doubt comes quietly into view. Strout writes with enormous tenderness about accepting an imperfect past and an imperfect self — about how we are all, as Lucy says, just trying to find our way. Short, spare and deeply humane.

Wonder

R.J. Palacio · 2012

Auggie Pullman was born with a facial difference and is starting school for the first time, braced for every stare. It is written for children and lands just as hard on adults, because it is really about the oldest question self-acceptance asks: whether you can believe in your own worth before the world has agreed to. Palacio’s answer — kind, unsentimental, quietly tough — makes it a book to hand to anyone who has ever felt they had to earn the right to be seen.