In times of precarity, the impulse to turn inward and exercise control where one can is seductive. It’s easy to forget that we are human and expect our lives to work as if we are robots. Resting, eating, having fun, and hanging out are not obstacles to the work of our lives; they are an indelible part of our lives. Priyanka Mattoo chronicles her personal attempts to disentangle her sense of worth from her functions and to absorb the day-to-day joys of life in her new memoir How to Be Less Useful.
Though titled in the lineage of Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, the book reads as more of a memoir-in-essays than a political rethink. Like Odell’s proposal that we reclaim our attention and resist the pressures of productivity narratives, Mattoo takes interest in the small reframes and readjustments that can reinvigorate our lives in the wake of a constant onslaught of daunting world events. However, she’s not rallying evidence in favor of an argument; she’s largely documenting her own trial and error. The fact that the author turned her attempts at being less useful into a book may undercut the goal slightly. Similarly, despite picking up a book titled How to Be Less Useful, readers might find themselves wanting to apply Mattoo’s reflections to become more useful.
Mattoo explicitly announces her own understanding of her writing as a kind that “involves digging deep into myself and then collaging the results onto a page, in hopes that someone else might recognize themselves in the pieces.” She talks the reader through her neuroses and qualms and stops and starts. Whether considering her childhood experiences across Kashmir, Saudi Arabia, London, and Michigan, how the challenges of parenting have transmuted as her children have grown older, or the navigation of many forms of grief shaped by both personal and more broadly disastrous events, Mattoo is self-deprecating and thoughtful.
Divided into four sections named for the seasons of her year of learning/unlearning, the individual essays in the book can blur together, retreading established hangups and demonstrating the serpentine nature of real personal growth. The four seasons feel less like a progression and more like the release of a deep breath, a loosening. While she narrates with a great sense of humor, occasionally the banality of arriving at the same lesson can veer towards repetitive. Well-worn ideas like nostalgia for a better era of the Internet can be tedious (“Galaxy Brain”). Some essays circumvent this issue with the interspersal of external sources, like “Art Monstress,” which engages with the career of painter Françoise Gilot as well as the author’s own creative career and takes its title from Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation. These are minor complains, mostly offset by Mattoo’s storytelling.
Her prose is conversational like a new friend trying to recap a busy few years, full of little quips. She offers her rationale and context while also being open to changing her mind or trying to take a different tack—“I think I hold up everyone’s sky with my trembling, exhausted arms,” she acknowledges before deconstructing the set of assumptions and influences fueling the perceived sky-holding.
Another admission from Mattoo: “It’s hard to accept that my friends might love me for reasons other than my usefulness.” This thought, that you are loved for your usefulness, is challenging to exorcise when service feels so core to the concept of self, when you show love by making yourself of use to your loved ones. The extreme, exhausting version of this, however, ends in self-pity and resentment, hence the premise of the book.
Noting in the opening pages that, “I feel like I’ve so severed my connection to pleasure that I don’t even remember what it feels like,” she reflects on the myriad external factors that interfere with identifying and articulating what she truly wants. Efficiency, achievement, and being of service to others can all be virtuous goals, but the danger is allowing them to crowd out everything else. When Mattoo stops in a small cafe while traveling in London, phone not working, she “note[s] how long it’s been since [she’s] had a pleasant experience that [she] didn’t text someone, or post online, or look up more details about.” Simple pleasures are often absentmindedly diluted by the inclination to share or dissect.
The author’s husband, Rodney, starts out in a bit of an “I told you so” role when it comes to the author’s relentless usefulness. Then, a few of the final essays in the book delve into the couple’s tensions about working time, family time, and living in Los Angeles, as Rodney launches his own company (“God’s Waiting Room”; “Good Housekeeping”). It’s a reminder that it can be easier to see someone else’s problems with usefulness than our own, and that negotiating these tensions within a household is a gradual process.
Rarely are the things that would make one’s life better some shiny revolutionary new idea. The questions and situations Mattoo wrestles with are inherently mundane. It can be entertaining to read about someone blowing up their life, and there are many stories both fictional and nonfictional that do that well, but what if you like a lot of the big pieces of your life, but you still feel like you can’t continue like this? The author’s experiences as a mother are often a catalyst—Mattoo realizes that her son freezes when complimented, much like she does, and decides she wants to change for both their sakes.
A recurring theme of How to Be Less Useful is the recognition that nobody necessarily asked Mattoo to be so “useful” all the time. Drilling down on that compulsion and its origins is a central project of the book. Everybody has their own concoction of familial examples, personal insecurities, and other special sauces that makes it hard to slow down, determine what actually enriches your life, and be present in the current moment. As Mattoo puts it, “Who has been selling me those shoulds?” Stopping and asking, What is it that I’m afraid of? What will happen if I don’t do this? is yet another sort of obvious option that we too often cast aside.
Being less useful is not a switch to flip, a product to order online, or one book with all the answers. In fact, our desire for those to exist is part of the issue. Mattoo’s book is an accompaniment—not a “How To” like a definitive guide, but “How To” like one might type into the Google search bar and scroll through the results, clicking links, making a note to hold onto a specific nugget for later.
NONICTION
How to Be Less Useful
By Priyanka Mattoo
Knopf
Published November 3, 2026
