Small Talk: 10 ADHD Lies and How to Stop Believing Them

By Richard and Roxanne Pink

Review by Katherine Perry, LICSW

Small Talk: 10 ADHD Lies and How to Stop Believing Them is a book by Roxanne Pink, who was diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, and her husband, Richard Pink, who does not have ADHD. You may know them from social media as @adhd_love_, where they share funny and insightful short form videos about the challenges of communicating and working together as a couple despite their very different brains. This dynamic is a familiar one for me, as a late diagnosed ADHDer with a neurotypical spouse, so I was excited to read this book. And now that I’ve read it, I’m even more excited to share it with my spouse.

Folks with ADHD often struggle to manage their symptoms in a world that isn’t made for them. However, the central premise of Small Talk is that the greater struggle is one of self esteem. The book focuses on 10 lies that many ADHDers have come to believe about ourselves - that we are lazy, stupid, broken, or worthless. For each of these lies, Roxanne shares her insights about how and why she came to believe these things, while Richard shares how he came to understand Roxanne’s experience with these beliefs, and how he supports her through them. 

Every struggle described by Roxanne was familiar to me, and yet her insights about those struggles made me see them in an entirely new way. I began taking medication for my ADHD many years ago, and my symptoms have improved quite a lot since then. Nevertheless, they do still pose challenges in my day to day life, and when they do I jump immediately to negative self talk. It simply does not matter that I only lose my keys once a week now, rather than once a day - my internal monologue remains exactly the same. This felt like something unique to me, a failure to change my mindset, in addition to the failure to keep track of my keys. Small Talk identifies this pattern as a normal part of ADHD in a way that changed my understanding completely.

If you have ADHD, or love someone who does, I highly recommend that you check out Small Talk: 10 ADHD Lies and How to Stop Believing Them.