A new book by Gareth Taylor

Underneath It All

What Men Feel But Don’t Say

Most men are fine. That’s the word. Fine. Ask again and it’s still fine.

But men are not emotionally illiterate. They feel deeply, fear, grief, shame, love, regret. Most men have been taught to manage those feelings rather than name them.

This book is about naming those feelings, twenty-two stories of men finding the words, the words for what they are feeling, the words to explain what sits underneath it all.

Twenty-Two feelings, one at a time

Each chapter takes a single emotion and follows one man into it. What he came in with. What it turned out to be. What shifted when he finally had a word for it.

A builder. A teacher. An architect. A logistics manager. A deputy headteacher who kept dreaming about a flight he never took.

Ordinary men, carrying ordinary weight, in the way most of us do. What made them different wasn’t the size of what they were carrying. It was that at some point they stopped, picked up the phone, and sat down in a room they weren’t sure about.

Nearly all of them said some version of the same thing: I wish I’d done this sooner.

I didn’t set out to write a book about men.

Through my work, I set out to understand them. To sit with them in a small room in Kent, session after session, and listen to what they brought.

What I found, again and again, was the same thing underneath everything else. Not weakness. Not brokenness. Just men who had been given a very specific education in how to be, had followed it faithfully, and had arrived somewhere in their forties or fifties at the conclusion that something was missing.

Not dramatically. Not in crisis. Just quietly, persistently, undeniably.

I wrote this for the men who haven’t made it to a therapy room, and might not want to. A book asks nothing of you. You can put it down. That seemed like a reasonable place to start.

Gareth

Out 1 September 2026