Lesley Garner
Lesley Garner
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Life Lessons
Everything I've ever done
that Worked
Everything I've ever
Learned about Love
Everything I've ever
Learned about Change
The Times of Our Lives

 

Life Lessons
  Life Lessons
 
   

Introduction

This book draws on a lot of life experience. There is my own experience, which I distilled and filtered into three books and then there is the experience of the thousands of newspaper readers who wrote to me when I became an advice columnist on a national newspaper, the Daily Telegraph.

I was offered the job as advice columnist partly because I had already written three books. The first one, “Everything I’ve Ever Done that Worked”, grew out of twenty years experience of self-exploration and journalistic research. The idea came to me during a dark night of the soul when, stumbling about in my insomnia, I tripped over a pile of my own notebooks and began to read. What I realised was that the notebooks were full of useful stuff. Wouldn’t it be a good idea, I thought, as I sat on my bedroom floor at four in the morning, to go through all these notes, take out the useful stuff and put them between two covers. I meant to make this book for myself, as a companion and aide-memoire in sleepless moments but a publishing friend thought this was a good idea too. It became a book of personal reflections, essays that I wanted to stimulate peoples’ thinking, encourage and comfort them and also give them something practical to do when they felt stuck or lost. Nothing pleases me more than when I hear from readers who treat this book as it was intended to be, as friend and companion.

I so enjoyed writing this first book that I decided I would write two more. Love and relationships are fundamental to the experience of being human so I wrote “Everything I’ve Ever Learned about Love.” In rebellion against the fixation with romantic and sexual love ¬ but reflecting on that too ¬ I trawled my own life for love in every form ¬ family, place, passions, friendship, children, art and nature and sex, of course. The book was revelatory and enriching for me to write and, I hope and am told, for people who read it.

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