Author - Sandeep Manush
 
Cheaper Than Therapy: And Other Things I Tell Myself is a humour and self-help adjacent book that refuses the self-help label. It is not a book with a five-step framework or a morning routine or a single insight delivered at length across two hundred pages. It is a book that sounds like your most self-aware friend at 11pm when neither of you has anywhere to be.
 
Written by Sandeep, the book draws on the specific position of being someone who knows what things are called and still cannot always figure out what to do about them. The result is a collection of chapters that are funny first, honest second, and quietly therapeutic third, without ever announcing that they are any of those things.
 
The book covers a specific and underrepresented emotional territory: not crisis, not breakdown, not the dramatic version of struggling that gets written about. It covers the ordinary inconvenience of having feelings at inconvenient times. The thought that arrives at 2am. The anger that is actually about control. The friendship that was always slightly asymmetric and took too long to name. The moment you realised you had been checking your bank balance after a payment you watched clear. The way a bowl of rajma chawal from your mother's kitchen is a completely different substance from the same dish made anywhere else.It does not pretend to fix anything.
 
It offers company, which is often what was actually needed.
 
Paperback