Alyssa Shelasky isn’t afraid of getting personal. As a writer, she has written about love and sex for decades. She was a real-life Carrie Bradshaw before Sarah Jessica Parker brought the character to life on the screen. She has met celebrities, knows all kinds of stories that she can’t tell in public, and has had her heart broken all over the world.
And eventually she found the thing that could help heal her.
Alyssa grew up in a loving Jewish family in Massachusetts and started to make a name for herself as a freelance writer in New York. She was engaged three times, once to a celebrity chef, but has never been married. She’s pitched dozens of television shows and tried to get a job in writers’ rooms, but she was never quite right for the job. She embraced her freedom, her independence, her self-expression. And then she found herself alone and unhappy and had to ask herself the hard question. What did she really want from her life?
The answer came to her. She wanted motherhood.
She wasn’t young. She wasn’t in a relationship. She had health issues that complicated the process. But she wanted to have a baby, on her own. And when she told her family, her parents and her sister cheered her on. Alyssa found a great fertility doctor. She chose a sperm donor. She breathed deep and crossed her fingers and then she felt like everything was right. And she got pregnant with her daughter.
And while this happens about halfway through the book, it feels like it’s the beginning for Alyssa’s truest love story.
This Might Be Too Personal is a shatteringly honest book of love and heartbreak, of questions about relationships and answers filled with self-awareness and emotional intelligence. There’s the story of her running away from the wedding of her ex-fiance’s best friend, the night after she broke his heart. She had run for blocks, abandoning her shoes, but desperately trying to get to her parents’ home while running into Ethan Hawke. There’s the story of her relationship with the Top Chef competitor that dissolved when he spent too much time traveling and flirting with models. There’s the story of her interviewing Sarah Jessica Parker, and getting a genuine hug from the actor when Alyssa told her she was pregnant.
But while all the name-dropping and world-traveling is interesting, the heart of this book is her pregnancy and her relationship with her daughter, and then adding her partner Sam, and then their adding a son. It’s her devotion to this family that shimmers from the page and makes this not just a fun beach read but an inspiring story of genuine love and acceptance that beats out any self-help book on the shelf.
Don’t get me wrong—I am all in for the celebrity gossip and would have been happy had then been more. But unfortunately for that part of my brain, Alyssa is too classy to publish much of that. And I wasn’t expecting her story to take a turn for the sentimental. But it does, and by then, I was in too deep to leave. I genuinely liked Alyssa and was rooting for her, and I wanted her to find the love and joy she was searching for. And because she did find so much heart-filling love, she’s able to share it with us readers, and we can close the book with fuller hearts and hope for a better future and the idea of a life with ease. This is a genuinely lovely book, and I feel like Alyssa has lifted me up through my time reading it.
Egalleys for This Might Be Too Personal were provided by St. Martin’s Griffin through NetGalley, with many thanks.
