APOLOGISE...HELL, NO!

Sherwood presents a memoir of a difficult childhood and a manual about meaningful apology.

The English-born author writes that he grew up in a “domestic war zone” with a narcissistic mother; his father left when he was 2 and didn’t come back into his life for 20 years. As an adult, he found that he’d “spent a large portion of my life demanding apologies that hadn’t come and then feeling resentful for it.” And yet, the “s-word” (“sorry”) still haunted him, which led him to analyze how it’s used, abused, and manipulated. For example, he explores how technology has changed human interaction and asserts that it’s weakened people’s ability to empathize. A genuine, direct apology, Sherwood asserts, requires more empathy and less ego—a lesson that he punctuates with anecdotes about his mother. She had a habit, he says, of looking for reasons that others needed to apologize to her, especially in public: “Narcissists tend to be chronically irritated, and it comes out via impatience,” he writes. Confident people who are content with themselves can easily say they’re sorry, he argues, and entitled people can’t. Sherwood also goes into detail about the emotional work he’s done to help himself and effectively acknowledges that he has more to do, taking Seneca’s advice: “Make sure against your dying day—that your faults die before you do.” He also takes an appealingly logical approach to his arguments, offering several examples to back up his claims, such as his father after the divorce, actor Will Smith after “the slap” at the 2022 Academy Awards ceremony, and politicians who often see apologies as dangers to their careers. Sherwood also ably examines different types of apologies, such as how a quick “sorry” is just a “pacifier” that “soothes in the moment without fixing the underlying problem.”

A deeply personal yet systematic approach to the delicate art of apologizing.