So I get sent these ARCs—Advanced Reader’s Copies—from various publishers, but since we try to time our reviews to coincide with publication, I often set these aside until closer to the publication date. Sometimes, if it’s a book I’m really excited about, I’ll go ahead and read it thinking I can just write up my review early and keep it. (Aside: so far, this hasn’t actually happened. But, theoretically, I could do something before an actual deadline. I am a grown-up) And, sometimes, I’ll take a book I’m excited to read upstairs, on a day when I am sick. And on such a day, I will have to put the book down because I’m laughing too hard and I can’t sleep and laugh at the same time and I need to sleep. It could happen that the book might get pushed under my bed, where it would stay, out of sight and mind, for several months. And don’t bother feeling smug, cuz if you’ve got wall-to-wall carpet there’s really no need to clean under the bed very often. Oh you still do? Hmmm.
All this to say, I’m ridiculously late with this review. I suspect that most of you have already managed to get your hands on a copy of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir)
Jenny Lawson has a mind that she should definitely leave to science, because it works in mysterious, but hilarious ways. She’s written a memoir of how she came to be the way she is, and it’s a wild ride of a taxidermy-loving father who filled their bathtub with dead racoons and their freezer with frozen rattlesnakes, a mother who says things that sort of make sense given the circumstances, her husband Victor who is the foil for some of Jenny’s wilder flights, and her daughter Hailey.
Jenny’s humour, I will underline, is not for everyone. For example, she swears freely and talks openly about, oh, any subject. I do mean any subject. But I have to admit that I thoroughly enjoy following the meanderings of her mind, which is unlike anyone else’s. Say, for example, you or I are telling a story. We pretty much go from A to B, with perhaps a brief stop on M or Q, as a related-but-hilarious sideline occurs to us. With Jenny, it’s A-Q-D-R-H-U-Y-B, and by the time she gets to B, not only is it supremely logical but you’re giggling helplessly.
She deals with serious topics—miscarriage, mental illness, poverty—in a way that makes them seem not only gentle but lovable too. Her account of growing up in small-town Texas will have tears rolling down your cheeks; her tales of her crippling anxiety disorder that terrorizes her in social situations will have you rolling on the floor. She says, “I’ll blurt out something . . . to fill the awkward silence, but for some reason the part of my mind that doesn’t have a filter can think only about necrophilia, and the part of my brain that recognizes that necrophilia is never an appropriate topic yells, ‘NECROPHILIA IS BAD,’ and so then I panic and hear myself start talking about why necrophilia is bad, and the part of me that is slightly sane is shaking her head at myself as she watches all the people struggle to think of an appropriate way to respond to a girl at a cocktail party who is against necrophilia. I feel sorry for those people.”
Her love of dead animals dressed in people’s clothes is something I can’t relate to, but her descriptions of conversations between she and Victor more than make up for it. I am sorry this review is so disjointed but mostly all I want to do it quote bits until you, too, are snorting coffee through your nose. Here go visit the Bloggess and read this.
If you are giggling, go get Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir)
Elizabeth loves the sort of memoirs that make even a case of the flu seem joyous. Read more at her blog Planet Nomad.
oooh, sounds mischievously delicious!
My husband and I both absolutely loved this book and all things Bloggess 🙂 Great review!
This review CRACKED me up! Not only the description of the book and your response to it, but the reviewers’ dilemma. Ha!
I keep hearing about this book, but didn’t know it was a blog. Sounds like…my kind of humor (maybe a little less clean than I’d like though).
I have been living under a rock lately. Otherwise known as new-mother-syndrome. I saw your review back in June and ordered the back that night—that is how much I knew I would love it. The Blogess says all the things you are not supposed to and makes you laugh when you know you really shouldn’t. At the same time you find yourself agreeing with her point of view (ok not all the time because really who else knows a cow that intimately?). Thanks for alerting this mamma to something in the real world that real excites me.