YouTube star Anna Akana is jumping out of the screen and onto the page — and getting even more personal — in her new book, “So Much I Want to Tell You: Letters to My Little Sister.”
Akana’s fans know her for her funny and relatable YouTube videos that talk about anything from one-night stands to ex-boyfriends, but many of her videos also discuss the importance of openness and honesty when dealing with issues such as mental health and depression. Her new book also focuses on these topics.
As the title suggests, Akana wrote the book in the form of letters to her younger sister, whom she lost to suicide in 2007. “So Much I Want to Tell You” tells the story of a big sister learning to cope with grief and find her strength again.
“I feel like everything I’ve written since her death in some way has kept her in mind,” Akana wrote in an email to Kore. “I’ve been very inspired and motivated to write about death, mental illness and suicide based on my experiences dealing with grief. It only felt natural to have the book — a culmination of lessons I’ve learned — in the form of letters to her.”
Akana tells readers in her book that following her sister’s death, she developed many self-destructive habits, but discovering comedy helped her channel her grief into something productive. Her YouTube videos cover topics such as work, ambition, love and money in a way that is somehow both sensitive and comedic. In writing “So Much,” however, Anna had to shift gears a bit.
“It was very difficult. I’m used to condensing everything into the most concise time possible, so [I] ended up with short first drafts,” she said. “So I had to retrain my brain to let itself breathe and paint the scene and really feel comfortable adding details that I’d normally cut from a script.”
Although Anna regularly opens up to her viewers on YouTube, opening up in a book can be a very different affair, and Akana had some reservations about sharing her story:
“The first draft had a lot of raw emotion that was cut in the rewriting process,” she said. “I was worried about the reception, and how I’m mostly known as the girl who constantly talks about her sister’s suicide. But it’s an essential part of who I am, and what made me who I am, so I made my peace with it.”
Although the desire to share some big-sisterly advice with her younger sister was what inspired her to write this book, Akana hopes that she can impart some important lessons on whoever happens to pick up her book, too.
“I hope that people gain some practical advice from the book,” she said. “Whatever resonates with them.”
Anna Akana’s “So Much I Want to Tell You: Letters to My Little Sister” is now available in paperback, audiobook and for Kindle on Amazon.
