I’m Alexandra Shaker. I’m a clinical psychologist, formerly based in Brooklyn, and now London. I’m also a writer. My first book, The Narrowing: A Journey Through Anxiety and the Body, was published by Viking (US) and Headline Home (UK) in March 2025. My writing is an interdisciplinary exploration of the human condition: I integrate psychology, literature, history, and contemporary culture to explore the psychological questions of our time, and the questions that I struggle with myself. Questions like: Why are so many of us so anxious? What does love mean today? How can we build rich inner lives? And always, How can we get out of our own way?
Here, you’ll find me contending with my questions, hesitations, and preoccupations through the lenses of psychology and contemporary culture together. You’ll also find book recommendations as there are few things I love more than reading and book matchmaking. I’ll be here every week. Thank you for joining me.
Let’s get into it.
I’ve watched, re-watched, and told anyone who will listen to watch the documentary Shark Whisperer (on Netflix). Ocean Ramsey free dives with sharks and she’s built her life around shark conservation work. But it’s more than that. Ramsey is powerful and otherworldly; she seems to know the sharks she swims with, to intuit their moods and movements, and even to love them.
Watching Ramsey swim alongside sharks has had me thinking about nonverbal communication, about dominance and submission, about intuition, and especially about fear. Early in the documentary, oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle says of Ramsey: “She gets in the water and asks the question ‘why should I be afraid?’” Sharks aside, this is a question we should all be asking ourselves.
Much of what I find captivating about Shark Whisperer, and what I suspect is contributing to its success, is that it is rare and beautiful to witness someone so wholly devoted to doing what it is that makes them feel alive, fear be damned. Ramsey says it plainly: “When I’m around them [sharks], I feel most alive.” She seems to strike a profound and provocative sort of balance between the fear and the feeling alive. You see the jagged meeting point of fear and vitality and the decisions that follow, playing out in real time. We’re all afraid, but also, we all want to feel alive.
Books:
Question 7 by Richard Flanagan
At the recommendation of a wise bookseller, I just finished Richard Flanagan’s exquisite Question 7, which deserves all of the (massive) praise it has received. It is a memoir and a history, and it is a mediation on what it is to be human, and on the ways that we treat one another.
“Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts? What if time were plural and so were we? What if we discovered we begin tomorrow and we died yesterday, that we were born out of the deaths of others and life is breathed into us from stories we invent out of songs, collages of jokes and riddles and other fragments?” (p. 11).
Question 7 is among the best books I’ve read this year. It is an education in history and empathy and in the art of writing, and at times, it literally took my breath away. I hope you’ll read it.
And a set:
Paradise Reclaimed by Halldór Laxness + The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives
Like many people, I have a fairly longstanding fascination with the Mormon church. Last month, I read Halldór Laxness’ novel Paradise Reclaimed, about a 19th century Icelandic farmer who converts to Mormonism and moves to Utah. Laxness is beloved in Iceland but not as well known as he should be elsewhere. He won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1955, and if you’re interested, here’s a piece from The New Yorker on his life (“The boy… wrote incessantly. For ten hours a day. He showed no interest in farm labor and, for reasons no one can explain, his parents let him stay inside at his desk” and “Throughout his life, he wrote with the tirelessness of a swimming shark”).
During the week or so that I read Paradise Reclaimed, I also caught up on the second season of The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. The timing wasn’t deliberate, but I’d highly recommend it. 1I thought of Laxness’ depictions of Utah’s vast landscapes and the early days of Mormonism as I watched all hell break loose for MomTok. And I thought of today’s Mormon church as I read Laxness describe its inception, and about what it means to find peace within oneself, or at least, to look for it.
I would also recommend any and all season(s) of the reality show Sister Wives about a formerly polygamist family that has recently fallen apart.