Description: A user manual for life, written by Stephen O'Grady for his daughter Eleanor.
A few months before my daughter was born, I started jotting down notes for her. Nothing formal, little more than anecdotes, stories or examples - the good, the bad and the ugly. They were initially strewn all over the place; some were captured in To Do apps, others in stray text files or scribbled in a Moleskine notebook. Part lessons learned, and part personal and familial history. Something in the spirit of Mark Oliver Everett's "Things the Grandchildren Should Know," I thought of it very loosely as a "Us
Eventually I consolidated the various fragments down and discovered that I had something close to 18,000 words of advice for my unborn daughter. I never got around to finishing the project, let alone publishing it. First, because how does one “finish” a user manual for life? Second, because it would be years before she could even read, let alone digest the advice I had to give. But the main reason it sat incomplete was simple: because I assumed that I had plenty of time to finish it.
Best case, this is still true.