Book Review: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened

What have you been doing the last ten years of your life? If you’re Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, you’ve been writing your memoir. Your twisted, bizarre and hysterically funny memoir. And for the last week or so you’ve been squeeing because it actually made the New York Times Bestseller list. Not too shabby.

I won a proof copy of Jenny’s book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir, from the publisher. If I hadn’t, I would have paid money for it (which is saying something for a girl who has a love affair with her local library). It’s funny. It’s quirky. It’s totally Jenny. If you don’t read her blog… well I feel sorry for you. If you do, this book is a must read. So go, read it!

Let’s preface this by saying I’m not a huge fan of the memoir. I like the always-something-happening feel of a novel or the treasure trove of new facts in any kind of “informational” book. Memoirs, unless they are about someone famous (and someone famous that I actually care about), don’t particularly interest me much. So to say that I really loved this book is really saying something.

One of my favorite chapters is the one where Jenny tells stories about her time in Human Resources. People are bizarre, boys and girls (especially you boys), and if  you’re ever looking for a never-ending source bizarre but true tales, HR is the job for you. My other favorite chapter is about Jenkins, the jumbo quail (turkey) and his friends. They lived in Jenny’s front yard. The were horrible. And? Awesome. Because it’s just too weird not to be true.

I belly-laughed my way through this book. My husband thought I was insane. Given what I was laughing at, he might be right.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading The Bloggess, go and have a look. And if you want more, go buy this book. You will not be sorry.

About The Author: Megan is a professional writer, amateur photographer and an accomplished beauty product crash test dummy. She'll try anything once, especially if it's a free sample. She's still trying to figure out what she wants to be when she grows up, but it will probably involve travel and Colin Farrell. And maybe some writing and photography. You can visit her at onethousandwordsormore.com or follow her on Twitter: msmegan.

Book Review: When Did I Get Like This?

You cruise along in your life, making decisions, getting things done, kicking life’s ass. And then one day you find yourself in a full-on panic because Chuck E. Cheese’s is booked on the day you planned your son’s birthday party and you don’t quite understand why you care so much. Amy Wilson‘s memoir, When Did I Get Like This? asks the very question that will inevitably go through your mind more times than you’ll care to admit once you’ve given birth. Or even thought that maybe it would fun to have a baby. Possibly.

For me it began when, after getting pregnant with scientific precision, I had a miscarriage. For Amy it began when she couldn’t accomplish what seems like a natural, easy thing: actually getting pregnant. Nothing makes you feel more like a failure than being unable to accomplish something 15-year-olds manage by accident in the back of some senior’s Mustang on a boring Saturday night. Except maybe actually having that baby.

I immediately bonded with Amy when I discovered she had the same distaste (pun intended) for What To Expect When You’re Expecting‘s now-defunct Best Odds Diet as I did. All through this book I found myself nodding my head along with her, from breastfeeding hysteria to knowing that something’s wrong with your child and everyone thinking you’re nuts to doing a really good job on something and having it go completely unnoticed and unremarked on (This, I believe, is the essence of motherhood: No one notices when you’re doing it right, but one bad moment and the whole world’s judging you).

The book is totally relatable; I can’t imagine a contemporary mother who hasn’t questioned both her maternal skills and her sanity after being assaulted with as much information and pressure to be “perfect” as we are subjected to on a daily basis. It’s about questioning every decision you make regarding your children and wondering frequently how in the hell your mother managed to get through your entire childhood without a stack of parenting books by her side (Hint: it’s because she didn’t have a stack of parenting books by her side). It’s about wanting to do what’s best for your kids and never really being sure exactly what that is. It’s the recognition that insanity has become the new sanity and none of us seems to be immune.

But what saves Amy, I think, is her sense of humor, her ability to see the insanity and identify it even while indulging in it. It’s the only sane thing to do, really.

Knowing you’re not alone is half the battle. If you’re a mom, go get this book. If you want to be a mom, go get this book.

You won’t be sorry.

Book Review: Half In Love

I suppose I should start this off with a bit of a disclaimer. This book, Half in Love (surviving the legacy of suicide) may not be for everyone. It is the story of a woman whose mother committed suicide, and who herself then went on to make several attempts on her own life.  However, as an admitted English geek (did you catch the reference in the title?) and lover of dark, realistic portrayals of life, this memoir by Linda Gray Sexton (yes! Anne Sexton’s daughter!) was something I knew I wanted to read immediately.

As someone who has struggled with depression for most of my life, reading Linda’s story was often painful and unsettling. In fact, I frequently found myself empathizing so much with her experience that I worried I was being pulled back in to a dark spiral. So much of her story and situation resonated with me, and in the end, I realized I was simply reliving my own pain in reading hers.

The story begins with the legacy itself.  Anne Sexton committed suicide when Linda was a senior at Harvard, and came after a lifetime of attempts and hospitalizations. Linda shares wrenching stories of being sent off to various relatives while her mother was ill and how this stained her childhood. Later, as she became old enough to care for herself, she was not sent off, but remained home to care for her mother. Linda wanted nothing more than this, and it established a dangerous codependent relationship between the mother and daughter. As a teenager, she began to pull away in superficial ways, but their bond was unshakable.

Once Anne died, Linda blindly moves forward with her life, still connected to her mother as executor of her posthumously published work.  But in that moment, there was nothing to fear. She could simply create the type of life for herself that she always saw in her mind, one that contrasted with her mother’s pain and shortcomings:

I thought I could pick the sort of mother I would be, as simply as I might pluck events or holidays from a river of experience. I thought I could consciously choose the foundation on which I would build the style of my mothering. I’d thought that decisiveness and self-control were the ways we shaped our futures; if those futures were handed down from generation to generation, then to succeed at changing them was still within reach with the application of a little bit of effort. It didn’t occur to me then that there was some secret code in both learned behavior and genetic, biological expression that was embedded with us. I could not see that these two factors might actually govern what I did, and what kind of mother I would be, regardless of how I strove to aim at a particular vision of myself in this role. I began to discover, slowly, that it was not a question of pure willpower.

However, Linda’s life is soon firmly in the grips of her previously undiagnosed bipolar disorder, and she wakes one day to find herself in an institution after having cut herself and taken pills in a bathtub while her children slept in the other room. The rest of the story catalogs two more attempts, the dissolution of her marriage, and the ultimate ascent from her downward spiral. Her story, this legacy of suicide, is completely heartbreaking, but it is also deeply woven with hope, love, and strength.

Do you know a girl that hates depressing stories? Yeah, DON”T buy her this book. Otherwise, you can find Linda Gray Sexton’s memoir at Amazon for just over $16.00

Feature image by taivasalla on Flickr

A Book For Wounded Souls

My friend Deanna sent me an instant message last week to see how I was doing.  I assured her that I was, still, doing fantastically awful.

And then she did the most annoying thing that people always do when they know you are feeling awful.

She recommended a book to me.

I don’t know why I didn’t punch Deanna.  Maybe because she was instant messaging me from Canada, and I have yet to figure out the emoticon for “punch in face through computer”.  Maybe because I really kind of love her.  Or maybe because, for some odd reason, my mental response was actually something along the lines of “I think you need this right now.”

Don’t ask me why.

I don’t know why I didn’t roll my eyes or immediately forget the name of that book.

What I do know is that I had $200 in my checking account, 24 hours until pay day, and a weekend conference I was leaving for that was going to require me to feed myself using a good chunk of that $200.

I stopped at Barnes & Noble on my way to the hotel and bought that damn book anyway.

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