On Being Human
Jennifer Pastiloff lost her father at eight, lost most of her hearing soon after, and spent two decades waiting tables in Los Angeles before she stumbled into running yoga and writing retreats for women. The memoir traces how she stopped pretending to hear, stopped pretending to be fine, and built a workshop practice she calls On Being Human. She writes about being mistaken for aloof when she is just lipreading, about late motherhood, and about the small repeated decisions that make a life. Cheryl Strayed wrote the cover blurb, calling Pastiloff a force. The book reads like sitting next to her in one of her retreats.
What you might want to know about On Being Human
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Jennifer Pastiloff traces a life shaped by hearing loss and grief into a public practice of workshops that ask people to drop the masks they wear.
Strayed wrote a cover blurb for the book, calling Jennifer Pastiloff a force of nature and praising the memoir as a moving, candid, and life-affirming portrait of how to live with loss and still keep saying yes.
Yoga is part of Pastiloff's story, but the book is primarily a memoir about hearing loss, grief, and the workshop community she built for women.
On Being Human was written by Jennifer Pastiloff, published in 2019 by Dutton.
On Being Human is 288 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, On Being Human takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
On Being Human is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.