Review: Something in the Woods Loves You

Finished on: 12/10/2025

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐  

 

                                         

 

On finishing this book, I initially wanted to rate it somewhere around 2 or 2.5 stars. After reflecting on it a bit longer, I've decided to bump it up to 3 stars for a couple reasons: I respect the ambition behind this book, and I admire Jarod Anderson's honesty and vulnerability in discussing a difficult subject. As a fellow sufferer of lifelong depression, I can imagine the courage it took to publicly share his experiences.  

 

So while the content of the book—its subjects and themes—has merit, its execution and presentation aren't doing it any favors.

 

Firstly, this book is marketed as literary memoir when, in fact, it reads much more like self-help. While there are certainly elements of memoir present—Anderson uses his lived experience as a prism through which to explore healing from depression—I'd argue the book devotes most of its pages to describing and extrapolating on therapeutic coping/healing tools. This makes it feel like reading self-help, which is exacerbated by some of Anderson's stylistic choices, such as directly addressing the reader and adopting a conspicuously motivational tone through much of the prose. 

 

I want to emphasize: there is nothing wrong with writing or reading self-help. But when a book presents as literary memoir (which is how the dust jacket and all the marketing materials describe it), and a reader expects literary memoir, it's jarring to pick up the book and find self-help instead. 

 

That’s not to say there’s no literary craft here. I underlined a handful of passages for their loveliness; some chapters make strong use of metaphor to explore their chosen subjects (“Morels,” “White Trillium,” and “Fieldmouse” stand out to me in this regard). Anderson's writing is strongest when he's sketching the outlines of metaphor and allowing the readers to fill in the rest. 

 

That being said, the structure and style of this book often undermine its strengths. The chapters are structured like blog posts rather than chapters in a narrative. Had I read these chapters in the form of blog posts, I'd likely be far less critical of the writing, because the aims of a blog post are different from the aims of literary narrative. Blog posts can afford to be more loosely structured, they are meant to be informal, and as such they are typically less concerned with concision of language. But chapters in a literary memoir? Cohesive narrative that relies on imagery and metaphor to drive meaning? That must be concerned with linguistic concision, it must strive for precision in imagery—and too many of these chapters fail to do that. They are too unfocused, too repetitive, and far too wordy.

 

It’s that repetition and wordiness that bothered me the most as I read through the book, because it feels like a symptom of the author’s distrust of his readers. Anderson is not confident that readers can parse his metaphors and imagery, so he follows them up with bald explication of their meaning. There's no room given for us to simply sit with the metaphor, to let it play in our imaginations and inform how we interpret the text. Instead, the author insists on explicitly stating what is already clearly communicated via imagery/metaphor, and it gets old fast. It's the irritation of hearing a hammer repeatedly bash the same nailhead. "Enough," I kept thinking, "I get it. I promise I get it. Can we move on now?" 

 

The central concepts of the book are also on repeat, continually repackaged and re-delivered to the reader. While I get that Anderson is trying to create touchstones that connect the chapters, the repetition becomes tedious. It feels like another form of authorial distrust: the reader can’t be trusted to remember and link themes/concepts between chapters, so those concepts must all be repeated ad nauseam. 

 

Ultimately, despite meditating on meaningful subjects, Anderson does not make the best use of his chosen genre, which creates a frustrating reading experience. If this book had been more memoir than self-help, and had the prose valued concision and trusted its readers, I would’ve enjoyed it more.

 

For anyone interested in reading literary memoir centered on the author's relationship to their environment, and which makes the most of the genre's strengths, I'd recommend:

 

• The Mountain and the Fathers: Growing Up on the Big Dry by Joe Wilkins
• Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard 
• H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald
• The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green
• Literally any of the nonfiction written by Barry Lopez or Wendell Berry, you can't go wrong

 
 (P.S. It's not the same without you, Starr, but I'm ready to carry on this little project of ours. Miss you, and thinking of you every time I finish a great book.)