Book Review: How to Explain by Louise Krug

Reviewed by Melissa Suggitt

Louise Krug writes with a voice so raw, it feels like she’s handed you her heart.

Reading How to Explain feels like sitting down with a friend who doesn’t shy away from telling you the messy, complicated, and achingly beautiful truth of her life. 

This memoir in essays pulls you into Louise’s world post-brain surgery, where partial facial paralysis becomes both the least and most defining part of her identity. It’s not a polished “I overcame it all” memoir, but rather an honest, vulnerable, and even funny look at what it means to live with visible and invisible scars. From explaining her condition to a curious neighbor kid to managing the tender complexities of marriage, motherhood, and self-image, Louise opens up in a way that hits you right in the feels.

My favorite thread throughout this unique narrative is the therapy sessions. As someone deeply familiar with the relationship between therapist and patient, and as someone working through self-esteem and executive functioning challenges myself, I felt an almost immediate connection to Louise’s stories. With each therapy session she described, I found myself nodding along, her words cutting close to my own experiences. Many of us know the struggle of finding the right therapist or of sitting in that room and not having the mental capacity to accept what we’re being told about ourselves. It’s easy to fall into a spiral of self-pity, wanting nothing more than validation that it’s okay to feel this way. Louise’s writing captures that so perfectly—the push and pull of wanting to stay in the safety of that narrative versus finding the strength to put in the work and change how you see yourself and the world around you.

For anyone juggling the chaos of work, kids, and just trying to keep it together, Louise’s words land like a lifeline. Her essays explore the weight of self-doubt and the ache of wanting to be seen as whole, and they do it with such candor that you can’t help but feel your heart cracking open a little. She doesn’t just write about living with challenges—she writes about living, period, in all its messy, vulnerable, beautiful imperfection.

And the way she tells her story? Completely, wholly her own. Each essay is a world—sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes deeply introspective, always engaging. There’s a transparency in her writing that feels like sitting in on a conversation she’s having with herself, and you’re just lucky enough to listen in.

Reading this book made me feel seen, like someone else gets the quiet struggles of trying to explain yourself to a world that loves tidy resolutions and simple stories. Louise doesn’t give you that. Instead, she offers you something better: a look at the unresolvable, the messy middle, the beauty in imperfection.

How to Explain isn’t just a moving book—it’s a hug for anyone who’s ever felt different, lost, or broken and is learning to find their way. It’s a reminder that being vulnerable is its own kind of strength. 

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