The Year of Yes

Yesterday, I read Maria Headley's memoir, The Year of Yes. Reading YoY right on the heels of Lauren Winner's Girl Meets God was interesting. There are some evident similarities:

• Both authors are young women (Maria Headley is 28, Lauren Winner is 29);
• Both have chosen alliterative titles (creating palindromes when abbreviated - YoY and GMG);
• Both chronicle their lives as single women in their very early 20s, engaging in casual sex with sometimes disasterous results, while looking for the right guy;
• Both are now married;
• Both arguably answer, on some level, to a higher power (vegetarianism and God, respectively).

However, YoY is unquestionably the better-written and more uplifting book of the two. It warrants a place on my bookshelf along with my "Fear Collection" (Susan Jeffers' Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach's Face Your Fear: Living With Courage in an Age of Caution, Rhonda Britten's Fearless Loving, Gavin de Becker's The Gift of Fear, Michael Crichton's State of Fear, and Phil Keoghan's No Opportunity Wasted). In GMG, Lauren Winner comments (correctly) that it is easier to read about prayer than to pray. This is also true about facing one's fears.

The Fear Collection goes well with my Jump Collection. Many years ago, I started collecting songs with the word "Jump" in the title. I started with the Van Halen song, and the Aztect Camera cover (both about seizing opportunities, albeit in very different moods). I added the Power Sisters and Kriss-Kross dance hits (respectively about requiring a would-be lover to prove his merit and telling the crowd what to do, I think), and Sinead O'Connor's "Jump in the River" (about obsessive love - "If you said jump in the river, I would/ Because it would probably be a good idea."). A friend suggested Aretha Franklin's "Jump to It" (about running to answer a lover's call). I think I had some other jump songs, but I don't remember them off the top of my head.

The one jarring note about YoY is that Maria Headley suggests that her "Year of Yes" opened her heart and allowed her to figure out what she really wanted. To some extent, that is true. But when you think about some of the specific choices she made durng that year, you can see that not all of them were working to open her heart or to help her figure out what she really wanted.

• Let's consider, for instance, her one-night stand with a classmate who was clearly a regular at the strip club they went to on their "date". It was not really a learning experience for her, in any sense of the word. It was just a humiliating experience. Especially when he told the class about it afterward in front of her.
  
  But she continued to hook up with guys who had not made any commitment to her -- not even the lowest level of commitment, which I suppose would be a "commitment" to continue to explore the relationship, non-exclusively, to see where things go.
  
  
• And the guy that Ms. Headley eventually married was not someone she learned to love by giving him a chance even though she didn't think he was her type (which would be the ultimate vindication of the "Year of Yes" method).
  
  To the contrary, she was immediately attracted to him on multiple levels - physically, emotionally, intellectually. She just did not act on that attraction the first time she met him because she knew he was unavailable to her (he was married), and because she thought that she wasn't ready to be a mother or stepmother (he had kids). So her "Year of Yes" basically kept her busy and out of trouble until this same guy (her future husband) came to New York to see her a second time and tell her that his wife had filed for divorce.