The Short Version
- Read by: Carly Schwartz narrates her own memoir with the comedic timing of a journalist who knows exactly which detail will unlock a scene, making the audiobook's difficult material navigable without being softened.
- At its heart: Depression and addiction alongside public success, belonging and community, the limits of self-improvement
- Vibe: Darkly funny and unflinchingly honest, propulsive despite its weight
- Short version: A memoir audiobook that earns its comparison to Eat Pray Love by being more honest about failure and more specific about the West Coast subcultures that shaped the author's decade.
Carly Schwartz narrating her own memoir about depression, addiction, and a move to a sustainable town in the Panamanian jungle is not the kind of audiobook that eases you in. The opening chapters establish both the outer life, top editor at a major news site, college degree, active social calendar, and the inner one, which has been running on a deficit since adolescence. Schwartz reads her own material with a self-awareness that is simultaneously the memoir's greatest strength and its most demanding quality. She is not performing vulnerability. She is demonstrating it, which takes a particular kind of courage and creates a listening experience that does not let you keep comfortable distance from the material.
Self-narrating a memoir about mental illness and substance use is a choice that pays off here because Schwartz's voice carries the specific comedic timing that makes the most difficult material navigable without softening it. Reviewer Lydia noted the memoir earns its comparison to 'Eat, Pray, Love but with addiction,' and that framing is apt in one important respect: like Gilbert's book, this audiobook is propelled by a narrator who is genuinely funny about her own worst decisions. The San Francisco subculture material, fifteen-person communes, Burning Man, charismatic startup founders, is rendered with affectionate absurdism that keeps the darker chapters from becoming unrelenting. Schwartz has the journalist's instinct for the specific detail that unlocks a scene, and she deploys it in the narration as well as the prose itself.
Good on the Outside, Crumbling on the Inside
Reviewer George observed that the memoir 'touches on universal themes of how everything can look good on the outside and still be crumbling on the inside, and how we'll try anything to try to feel better.' That universality is what elevates the audiobook beyond niche memoir. You do not need to have moved to Panama or attended Burning Man or worked at a major news organization to recognize the experience Schwartz describes. The specific environments are vivid and sometimes surreal, but the underlying dynamic, presenting a coherent successful self while managing an interior that is quietly falling apart, is not particular to her circumstances. The decision to narrate herself means that recognition lands with the authority of lived experience rather than reconstruction from a remove.
Reviewer cory described the audiobook as 'very honest about what it's like to live with depression and search for relief in every possible place' while also calling it 'wildly entertaining.' That combination is genuinely difficult to achieve in memoir, and Schwartz manages it by refusing to let either quality overwhelm the other. The Panama section, which could easily become either a redemption parable or a disaster story, is handled with enough ambivalence to feel accurate to what actually happened. Schwartz did not go to the jungle and find herself in any simple sense. She found something, and the audiobook is honest about how complicated and partial that something was when she encountered it.
Schwartz Navigates Shifts With No Reassuring Geometry
The memoir's tone shifts between sections in ways that are intentional but occasionally jarring in the listening experience. The comedic West Coast subculture material and the chapters dealing most directly with suicidal depression occupy the same narrative timeline but require different emotional investments from the listener. Schwartz navigates these shifts with skill, but listeners who find tonal variation in difficult memoir disorienting should be prepared for the register to change without extensive transition. This is not a book that keeps the darkness at arm's length in order to preserve the comedy; it holds both simultaneously.
The audiobook is also structured as a literary memoir rather than a recovery narrative, which means it does not conclude with the reassuring geometry of a twelve-step arc or a clean arrival at mental health. The resolution is partial, authentic, and complicated by the continued presence of the conditions Schwartz has learned to manage rather than eliminate. Listeners looking for a more conventional before-and-after recovery story may find the ending unsatisfying. Listeners who want a more honest accounting of what recovery actually looks like over time will likely find it exactly right.
Schwartz's journalist background also shapes the audiobook in ways that distinguish it from literary memoir written by writers who have worked primarily in fiction or academic nonfiction. She has a reporter's instinct for the scene that opens a chapter without signaling where it is going. She knows how to withhold context just long enough to make its arrival meaningful. And she applies those skills to material that is deeply personal without losing the critical distance that keeps memoir from collapsing into therapy. The result is an audiobook that feels simultaneously intimate and shaped, as though Schwartz has given the material exactly as much structure as it needs without imposing more than what the story itself supports. That balance is harder to achieve than it looks, and it is one of the qualities that makes I'll Try Anything Twice a genuinely accomplished piece of writing rather than simply an honest one.
More Darkness Than Eat, Pray, Love
Readers who loved 'Eat, Pray, Love' and wished it had more darkness and self-awareness will find this audiobook exactly what they were looking for. Listeners who have personal or family experience with depression and addiction will recognize the texture of what Schwartz describes and value how she frames it. Fans of West Coast subculture writing, the commune scene, the Burning Man circuit, the startup founder mythology, will find the contextual material richly rendered. Those who need a clean redemption arc or who find comedic framing of serious mental health material uncomfortable should approach with appropriate caution.
How graphic is the audiobook's treatment of depression and addiction?
Schwartz is honest and specific about both, including suicidal ideation in adolescence and her adult use of drugs and alcohol. She approaches the material with the same literary sensibility she brings to the rest of the memoir, but listeners who find detailed accounts of mental illness or substance use difficult should know those topics are central to this audiobook.
Does the audiobook resolve with a recovery narrative, or does it leave things open?
The ending is honest rather than triumphant. Schwartz reaches a form of stability and self-understanding, but the audiobook does not conclude with a clean recovery arc. The resolution is partial and complicated in ways that feel accurate to actual recovery rather than to recovery memoir convention.
Is the Panama section a significant part of the audiobook, or is it a brief episode?
The Panamanian jungle sequence is one of the audiobook's centerpieces and receives extended treatment. It functions as both a literal setting and a metaphor for the extreme measures Schwartz considered in her search for relief, and it is where the darkest material in the memoir comes fully to the surface.
