The Satisfied Introvert
How I Broke Free from the False Self I Created and Started Living Authentically (So Can You): New and Expanded Edition
Narrated with emotional intensity, The Satisfied Introvert is a memoir about working to succeed beyond social challenges; it includes suggestions for others, too.
Benjamin Plumb’s memoir-cum-self-help-book The Satisfied Introvert is about navigating the harms of a world made for extroverts.
Plumb grew up feeling overwhelmed by noise. He also had trouble speaking in front of people. Self-conscious, he fell behind his peers. While a school presentation taught him to be prepared, helping him to integrate better with others, the lesson was not applicable in all circumstances. He struggled with love and in his career, getting divorced and switching working paths. He started to reconsider preparation as a method, to understand ways in which it was insufficient, and to develop an approach to the world that could work better for him and fellow introverts.
Narrated with emotional intensity, as with references to “the ache inside [that] slowly unwound itself” while Plumb crawled out of depression, the prose is enlivened by doses of humor tied to a bevy of complicated situations and misinterpretations of others. For example, Plumb’s first attempt at getting a girlfriend is discussed in terms of his shyness and awkwardness and the girl’s defensive bravado. Messages for others are pronounced in relation to such scenes; indeed, each chapter breaks down what lessons Plumb learned or missed and includes exercises related to it. For example, a lesson about overreliance on a single method for dealing with others, limiting individualized responses to particular situations, appears in Plumb’s story about working to learn Portuguese to win the girl over while missing that she wouldn’t be a fit with his temperament and was also a confused teenager like himself.
The self-help portions of the book are otherwise quite isolated from its memoir portions, though; they consume the book’s beginning and an appendix and come in at the ends of the chapters. They delineate four introvert approaches to the world, including the methods of conscientious introverts who, the book suggests, cope by analyzing and organizing everything. How each approach might help individual introverts self-protect and fit in to a more extroverted world is shown and juxtaposed to how the approaches are limiting and can be misapplied.
Eleven tools for unpacking each approach and reworking it to be more authentic and adaptable are named, as with balancing one’s internal needs with one’s particular settings. Such concepts are covered in clear terms. Still, the book’s elements for others are quite limited; indeed, the four types and eleven tools are not exhaustive by design. Plumb’s story is illustrative of their principles, helping others draw connections between the book’s suggestions and how life is lived, but his story is the sole source of support for the self-help portions of the book; there is little outside research represented.
The Satisfied Introvert is a memoir with self-help elements that addresses individual social challenges in a poignant way.
Reviewed by
M. W. Merritt
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book and paid a small fee to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. Foreword Reviews and Clarion Reviews make no guarantee that the publisher will receive a positive review. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
