Summary of The Art of Asking

With this combination of autobiography and self-help manual, punk singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer expands on her popular 2013 TED Talk on “The Art of Asking.” Palmer has worked as a human statue, a performer and a singer. Each job helped her learn how to connect with others and ask for help. She covers life on the road in her art-punk band The Dresden Dolls, explains how crowdfunding makes it easier for artists to ask for help, and discusses her personal life, including her struggles with shame and her marriage to author Neil Gaiman. Palmer’s message of how to ask for help is the core of her text. But this manual, like her life, is chaotic. Her memoir sometimes seems like a stream-of-consciousness exercise and its confusion shrouds her heartfelt ideas about the need to escape shame and remorse. Still, getAbstract recommends Palmer’s tale of creative ambition and fearlessness to entrepreneurs, inventors and artists of all types.