Heart and Honesty

Kino MacGregor, author of Sacred Fire: My Journey into Ashtanga Yoga, is more open about herself than Benjamin Lorr, who wrote Hell-Bent. To me, there feels greater heart in what she has written. She describes eating issues and fears of falling in love, insecurities and neuroses. There are far fewer laughs but a greater exposing of herself as, like all of us, a wounded human being:“I am absolutely terrified of looking like a fool,” she writes.

There can be the danger of that too-exposed an approach, of the self-disclosure culture. One view is that in the land of Oprah, such confessional heart-on-sleeve habits are perhaps more about marketing and rituals of authenticity rather than a radical honesty.