Book Review: Embracing Your Own Purgatory

The Anti Self-Help Book You Read When the Plan Stops Working

Geoff Curtis‘s wife asked him the question most couples leave alone: “Working as hard as you did. Was it worth it?”

He thought about it. Financially, yes. Personally, no. “I wasn’t there for friends, family or for you.”

That exchange lives in Chapter 11 of Embracing Your Own Purgatory (Manuscripts LLC), Curtis’s account of what happens when a nearly 30-year career ends and the identity built on it walks out with it.

It’s an anti-self-help book in a genre that can’t stop prescribing. Curtis refuses the obligatory framework, the five-step plan, the triumphant third act already underway. He names four purgatories (identity, expertise, purpose, and achievement) but doesn’t package them as a process. What he calls them, instead, is the weather seen from four different windows. That restraint is where the book earns its trust.

The line the book builds to: Productivity isn’t the same as progress. Some of Curtis’s most productive days, he admits, were disguised avoidance. Some of his “wasted” days (sat and thought, ran errands, took time to go to lunch) carried the real work.

The book’s offer isn’t a map. It’s company. “I’m still in it,” Curtis writes. “You might be, too. Or perhaps you will be again.”

If you’re sitting in your own version, whether the role disappeared, the kids left, or the marriage ended, this isn’t the book that will get you out. It’s the one that will sit with you while you figure out whether getting out is the point.

Meet Geoff here.