I needed this book. As a writer finishing her first book, the grueling slog that HSK depicts of his own first book process just pulsates with companionable honesty and gut-punches of humor as well as grief. My writing year has been filled with acceptances and rejections, and neither has proved as straightforward to parse or absorb as I once assumed they would be, and Congratulations, Who Are You Again? is the first book about writing (and life) that I’ve read that adequately addresses that complexity, and does so in a soul-baring and self-deprecating way. I knew this book would be funny. And it absolutely delivers on that. The chapter about his half-sister is the new thing I’m going to think about whenever I need to laugh myself out of a mild funk. But like his previous book, this one had a profound emotional undercurrent that made it feel like so much more than merely funny. Chapters about his wife and daughters and mother were just rich with love and warmth and light (and beautiful prose), but also with the inner conflict that plagues those of us who have dreams that make us get up in the dark to sit in coffee shops to write, leaving those we love behind sweetly sleeping, which maybe we should or could be too if we were less driven by whatever angel or demon causes people to do such things. But if you are a writer attempting to balance your writing with parenthood and partnership and full-time work and being someone’s child and other people’s friend, this book is just necessary. You need this book more than you know. It will feel like your new favorite friend, the one who makes you feel not insane, like being you is good and okay, and there’s a place for people like you at the table of this book. It also punctures some of the too often self-serious and unhelpful writing advice levied out to writers and at the same time is eminently practical about the logistics of the publication and post-publication process. But I think beyond writing, just as someone also entering midlife, this is a necessary book, because it wrestles often pretty slyly and never less than deftly with both the glories and the limits (and the glories within limits such as hotel ice machines) of living your dream, both of which feel more real to me now than they did when I was 20. So I feel the audience here is wider than just writers—it’s anyone who wants anything and finds themselves stymied throughout the process of that desire, both in the trying as well as the getting. So to fellow writers and fellow mid-lifers and fellow anyone’s, you need this book. This book is your new favorite friend. I just finished it today, and I’m turning right back to Page 1 to just read it all over again, because I’m not ready for it to be done just yet. I feel grateful for the all the work it took to get it made, and I’ve told roughly 76 people face to face they should read it, and all my social media contacts, and now I’m telling all of you, kind people of the wider Internet. This book is golden, and we need it.