This book can be read in two ways, and what you take away depends on which one you choose.
The first way is to read it as a textbook: picking out techniques, underlining phrases, leafing through in search of ready-made formulas. You can read it that way, and you will even take something from it. But you will take little – about as much as a person carries out of a restaurant after copying down the menu instead of eating.
The second way is to read it as a story. Simply follow the hero, live through his evenings, his mistakes, his quiet victories. Don’t hunt for ready-made techniques; watch how a living person in a living room achieves what you yourself cannot. That is how this whole text is built: there is no theory here set apart from examples. Here every conversation is itself the technique, dissolved in it without a trace, like salt in water...