Book Review

The Journal of Best Practices by David Finch

Matt and I were at the library when I happened to see the bright yellow cover of this book and the tag line “A Memoir of Marriage, Asperger Syndrome and One Man’s Quest to be a Better Husband”. I opened to a random page and was hooked, so it cut the reading list line when really it had no right to do so.

David Finch’s marriage was on the rocks when his wife finally figured out what was wrong with him: he has Asperger Syndrome. He decides to uses his Asperger powers for good not evil and begins a self-improvement quest to save his marriage.

Reading his memoir I was transported back to high school English class and the analysis framework of every hero which includes a tragic flaw, an excessive virtue, and a fatal mistake. What a simpler time did everyone live in before general public access to the DSM-IV! The worst you could do was be arrogant or accidentally sleep with your mom or something.

Now that we are all so terribly self-aware there is SO MUCH MORE trouble we can get ourselves into and our hero David Finch goes barreling head first into that recursive spiraling death trap of self-improvement. Still the high school English framework still holds so I’ll give it a go: David’s excessive virtue is that he knows he’s not perfect and flawed and so tries to improve, but in the process of improving indulges some of his very worst personality traits. His tragic flaw is that deep down he’s a jerk. His fatal mistake is completely underestimating the amount of time and effort that is involved in housework.

While the excessive self-improvement is the heart of the book, it’s those last two that gives the book legs. After all being a better husband for him is about being less of a jerk and helping more with the housework. (The cruelest thing he told his wife took my breath away.) He readily admits that he expects his wife to be a better homemaker and compares her regularly to their Martha Stewart-esque neighbor next door.

The thing is his wife has a job outside the home – one that provides benefits no less- and so baring her mastering space and time she can only be in one place at one time doing one thing and so what does he really hope to accomplish texting her at work in the middle of a meeting that the neighbor made homemade salsa? The neighbor is a stay-at home mom who apparently runs a daycare out of her basement – it is within her time resources to make homemade salsa. The only thing rubbing it into his wife’s face was going to accomplish was to piss her off.

Which, due to his self-improvement efforts, he realizes. So off to the kitchen he goes to get the kids ready for morning drop-off. Except he can’t and ends up getting to work regularly at 11:30. This in turn starts getting him in trouble at work. (There are no more texts about homemade salsa after that point in the book.)

David’s self-improvement quest comes to a halt when his wife tells him to knock it off. It’s too bad cause things were really getting interesting and it might make for a more interesting book, but it was probably a good time to stop marriage-wise.  I ended up liking both David and his wife by the end of the book. It was an easy and entertaining enough read with just the right amount of feel-goodness, (though not enough meat to subscribe to his on-going blog on the matter).