Tell Everyone on This Train I Love Them is my first Maeve Higgins experience other than LOLing at her shenanigans on “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!”- which is honestly one of my favorite things to do. She spouts nonstop hilarity with zero hesitation and the added benefit of a charming Irish accent that is impossible to resist. I highly recommend listening to an episode or two with her before diving into this book, because while the essay where she accidentally eats way too much of something (that I won’t name here) isn’t ENTIRELY humorous, the parts that are funny are even funnier with the accent. I will say I went into this book expecting a lot more comedy than there is. However, I’m not disappointed. At all. There are certainly some laugh out loud moments, but more importantly there was a lot of really beautiful writing.

I really love the blurb provided by the publisher that Higgins is “writing about a country that can feel broken into pieces and the light that shines through the cracks,” as Higgins is, in fact, an immigrant- and therefore she does have a unique perspective on this country. She’s also quite aware (and discusses) that she is from Ireland and her immigration experience is incomparable to what is going on at the border with Mexico. I will say that I was weirdly hyper-aware that I was reading the thoughts of a cis white woman regarding racial justice, immigration, the pandemic, the climate crisis- etc, but at the end of the day the through-lines of Higgins’ reckonings with her mental health and anxiety made this a read that was well worth it for me.

Two excerpts that I particularly loved:

On mental health, from “Bubbles and Planks”:

“Too often when my mental weather requires I take a raincheck, I either force myself to carry on or I retreat and cover it up with lies. The effort it takes to push through a business meeting at the same time as another layer of my mind is whirring with a hundred unbidden and terrible scenarios leaves me bone-tired, but I’d rather do it than cancel the meeting and admit defeat by anxiety. And ‘Oh, damn, I just got a deadline—I don’t think I can make it to dinner’ is much easier to tell a friend than ‘I feel like my skin is missing and I don’t want you to see me like this.’”

On leaving Earth for Mars to escape the climate crisis, from “Death Tax”:

“The trip to Mars will take around nine months, assuming you make it through the meteors and cosmic radiation. You’d then have to figure out how to land, and that’s when the work would truly begin: creating entirely new conditions that could allow you to survive. Even thinking about it a tiny bit seriously is an enormous feat of imagination and ingenuity. Instead, we could use that same imagination and ingenuity right here on Earth, right now, when we need it so desperately. Ghosting the planet is the worst thing we could do to ourselves. It’s difficult to fully love the one you’re with, though, if you don’t see a future together. So I’m imagining a beautiful future for us and this planet, the happiest of marriages with coral and forests and honeybees all around.”

This is a quick read that will please folks looking for a gentle but profound perspective on many current issues, particularly dealing with mental illness.

Thanks to NetGalley and Viking for the review copy!

I'm a pretty big fan of Maeve Higgins, but I still found this to be a bit dry and political. I assumed this would have more of a personal feel, but it is more like essays on current issues.