Have you ever held a grudge for years? (Unrelated but are you a Scorpio by any chance?) Grudges can be good, actually, and we should hold onto some of them, like petty Tamagotchis in our emotional pocket. We don’t often associate the holding of grudges with virtuous people, but 2019 is a new year, new you.

Sophie Hannah, who wrote “How to Hold a Grudge,” published Jan. 1, loves them. So much so that she holds each of her grudges in a special place, in her “grudge cabinet,” where she visits them and tends to them.

A prolific crime novelist, Ms. Hannah, who is not a psychologist, used her personal experience — and lots of therapy over the years in which she discussed her grudges in detail — to write this book.

Here is her system of enlightened grudge keeping to process your pettiness.

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Redefine the word “grudge”

as an experience to learn from.

Ms. Hannah isn’t generally in the habit of redefining words that are in the dictionary. “But there’s no dictionary definition I can find that doesn’t describe a grudge as a negative feeling, or a collection of negative feelings,” she said.