Ryan Holiday

It gets you to reflect on your situation as much as what's happening to the characters.

I was struck by that scene, too.

And then what the stakes of that scene mean is that having lost one of the bullets, he now faces a day to day reality where his insurance policy like, well, I could always kill him and myself before something horrible happens.

Those two bullets in the gun are representative of that.

And so to have to use that bullet there to save his son creates this profound tension in the rest of the book, which is every exchange he's now having to think about his inability to save him and his son from potentially heinous, unlivable torture.

I would say the one flaw of the book that I experienced rereading it now is the character of the wife.

I remembered her as not having the stomach for the Walking Dead horror show that was their lives.

I guess I didn't pick up on the earlier reads.

I took it to mean that she basically rejects the child from birth.

that she doesn't want to hold it right after it's born, that there's something about who she is or what she's going through that makes her not want to have anything to do with the kid.

It felt very one-dimensional.

I felt like she could have been more well-rounded and that her as a plot device, which is that she was there and then wasn't there, could have been rendered in a way that doesn't make her fundamentally unmaternal and the father sort of a superhero.

So that did ring less realistic or meaningful to me in this other reading.

I don't know what you thought.

Yeah, I like to call it a parenting book in disguise.

I think a lot of men especially maybe aren't going to sit down and read a parenting book, but there's a lot of parenting lessons in here.

Just even your point about the bravest thing you can do is just get up and keep going.

There's a part in the book where he's...

talks about just trying to tell his kids stories, like stories of virtue and just things to instill him with hope and values.

Obviously, this connects back to the idea of carrying the fire.