"I didn't get decapitated, so my affair with chess really wasn't so bad."(2)

I postulate that the reason most memoirs are...of a... questionable caliber is because the author simply did not understand why they were writing it. And more specifically, for whom. As such, many memoirs-- no matter how interesting the life of the writer--feel under-edited, navel-gazey, and sloppily organized. Very often while reading memoirs I find myself thinking "so what?"

Happily, this is not such a memoir.

Sasha Chaplin may have made all the wrong moves when it came to chess, but he made all the right ones when it came to putting this memoir together.

"All the Wrong Moves" tells the story of a man chasing the dream of being interesting, being extraordinary, being a winner...and crashing and burning and feeling miserable (both physically and spiritually) as a result.

That's right: this is secretly a self-help book. But not one of those preachy ones with steps and little daily tips; this is a self-help book meant to humble its audience when you, the reader, realize you may also have, at some point or another, suffered from main character syndrome. "How would the rest of this go? I wondered. Like, the rest of my life? [...] Running from one distraction to another, finding any defined life unbefitting of a never-ending sense of grandiosity." (174)

Chaplin positions himself as the 'everyman' and yet, as we follow his tumultuous chess journey from one exotic location to the next, we are let in on a little secret: you don't have to be a chess champion to be interesting. His character sketches of the people he meets, and his quintessentially Millennial self-deprecating sense of humor move the narrative along while in between anecdotes about himself he sprinkles in lessons he's learned from past mistakes, and quirky little fun facts about the titular sport of chess.

And yes, this is a book about chess as much or more so than anything else, so you do have to be at least a smidge interested in it to pick this up, yet Chaplin keeps things accessible in a way that suggests the chess stuff is geared towards a fairly unfamiliar audience. That is: you would probably walk away from the book knowing more than you did before. Certainly, you'd walk away knowing a few fancy names for various chess strategies. You'd also come away with a good sense of a few of chess's 'main characters'; quirky grandmasters, neurotic (and normal) chess superstars, a slew of wacky (and normal) people Chapin played during his pursuit of chess fame and fortune, including the last person he ever played chess against.

If you have even a fleeting interest in the world of competitive chess and how it could land a guy on a questionable toilet in the middle of nowhere in India a few years after leaving it all behind to move to Chiang Mai with a girl he'd just met, 'All the Wrong Moves' could be for you.

And if you're still not sure, read it to find out the secret of chess from grandmaster and prominent side character, Ben Finegold -- it really hits once you finally get there.