Something I’ve been putting off saying

I built you a library

I’ve been writing this letter in my head for about three months.

Not because the news is bad. It isn’t. But because I have a complicated relationship with asking people for money, which is a fairly significant liability for someone who keeps writing books.

Here’s what’s happening.

Quiet Half now has a paid tier.

Eleven books, four conversation card sets, and an audio course are available to paid subscribers at no additional cost. You subscribe, and the library is yours. Every new book I publish goes in as well, without you having to do anything. Plus all my latest podcasts.

If you want to see what’s in there before deciding, the full list is at my mindblownpsychology site. Nothing is hidden behind a login on that page. If you like what you see, you can upgrade directly.

I should explain why this exists, because it isn’t the origin story you might expect.

I didn’t set out to build a subscriber library. I set out to write books that said things I couldn’t find anywhere else, on topics I thought psychology had handled clumsily or dishonestly, and to put them somewhere people could actually find them.

The problem with that plan is that “somewhere people can find them” turned out to be an extraordinarily optimistic phrase. Publishing a book and assuming it will be discovered is a bit like putting a message in a bottle and assuming the tide will have good editorial judgment.

The library is the solution I eventually arrived at. Instead of hoping each individual book finds its way to the people it’s for, I can simply offer the whole thing to the people who are already here, already reading, and already decided that this particular strand of psychology is worth their time.

That’s you. You’re already here. Which makes this a fairly easy conversation, at least on my end.

The books cover ground I haven’t seen covered elsewhere.

Some of them are direct challenges to the way psychology currently talks about depression, neurodivergence, and the relationship between individual distress and the circumstances producing it. One argues that depression is, in many cases, a reasonable response to an unreasonable situation. Another looks at what happens when neurodivergent adults are misdiagnosed for decades before anyone asks the right questions. There’s one on AuDHD specifically, written after my own diagnosis at 66, which is either very late or very on-brand depending on how you look at it.

There are also three novels. They’re set in Vietnam. They involve a psychologist who keeps finding himself in situations a psychologist probably shouldn’t be in. They’re not literary fiction. They’re the kind of books I wanted to read on a long flight and couldn’t find.

The conversation card sets are exactly what they sound like: structured prompts for couples, for new connections, for senior couples, and for families navigating adolescence. They work. I use them.

The audio course is five days on creative silence, which sounds like it should be more mystical than it is. It’s practical.

More audio courses are coming. One on Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria is in development, which is a topic that gets discussed mostly in the context of ADHD and mostly badly.

And there’s a weekly podcast about psychology stuff. As you do when you are a psychologist who appears to love the sound of his own voice.

The free tier stays exactly as it is.

You’ll keep receiving the newsletter whenever I have something worth saying, which is how it has always worked. I don’t publish on a schedule. I publish when the piece is ready, which sometimes means twice in a week and sometimes means a month of silence while I’m working on something longer.

If you choose not to upgrade, nothing changes between us. I mean that without any of the passive-aggressive weight that phrase sometimes carries. I write this newsletter because I find it useful to think this way, in public, with readers who are willing to push back. That remains true regardless of subscription tier.

If you do want to upgrade, the full library is listed here—every title, every card set, the audio course. Have a look, and if it’s worth it to you, you can upgrade directly right on this page.

Thank you for reading. For the months of it, or the years of it, however long you’ve been here.

It counts.

Lee

Lee Hopkins is a counselling psychologist, author, and recovering optimist based in Đà Lạt, Vietnam. He has published 15 books and is working on several more, which is either impressive or a symptom of something, and possibly both.