How to deal with life getting away from you
If you’re reading this review from the vantage point of having always felt utterly fulfilled by every element of your existence, then what you’ll find between the pages of Cabin will be a kind of peculiar novelty leading to a complacent sense of your being simply better at living than the writer of the book in your hands. If, however, you’re aware of the fact that you have taken some choices in life that were more convenient than compelling; or that you spend your days doing things for somebody else’s benefit as much as for your own; or that there’s somewhere or something else you might rather be, then Cabin will give you a sense of familiarity, a character to root for, plenty of vicarious joy, and an ending both happy and aspirational. I guess what I’m saying is that I can’t really think of any good reason why you wouldn’t want to read Patrick Hutchison’s debut memoir.
This is, unsurprisingly, a book about a cabin. Specifically, the cabin that Hutchison bought on a whim in 2013 when he had the idea that property ownership might be the kind of thing that could give him the sense of purposeful adultness that seemed to be missing from his life as a semi-itinerant Seattle copywriter and aspiring ‘Hunter S. Thompson meets Paul Theroux and Anthony Bourdain’. So he buys a cabin and spends the best part of the next decade learning-while-living how to own a cabin, renovate a cabin, repair the renovations of a cabin, maintain a cabin, yearn for the next time he can get to the cabin, worry about the cabin, fall in love with the cabin, and let the experience lead him to a better way of living and of being.
One of the few life goals in which I can claim success is the fact of never having read a book that might find itself sold in the self-help section of a bookshop. So I have to say that Cabin is not a self-help book. At least no more than any good book that encourages its readers to think about what it is to be a person in the world is a self-help book. Which is to say that this is a self-help book because every good book is one too. Over the course of its pages, Hutchison engages with the ways in which life can get away from us all, and with the need for escape from a world in which it is too easy to forget that our minds and bodies were made for doing things, hard things, things we will mess up and fret about and laugh about and learn from. What these things are will differ from person to person – DIY is certainly not the path to personal fulfilment for this reader – but we can all benefit from the reminder that there are compromises in life that harm because they are too easy and comfortable to make. Cabin can help remind you, while giving you a huge amount of pleasure at the same time. I still can’t think of any reason why you wouldn’t want that.
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