Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson
My rating: 4/5 cats
watch your fucking back, sloane crosley…this lady is funny-funny, not “boys tell me i am funny at parties because i am pretty” funny.
i am so glad that kelly read this before me and it encouraged me to pick up my ARC and get into it far earlier than i ordinarily would have. BUT NOT EARLIER THAN I WOULD HAVE HAD I ACTUALLY WON THIS THROUGH THE FIRSTREADS PROGRAM, WHICH IS HOW THIS SHOULD HAVE GONE DOWN, GOODREADS! STOP WITH THE SNUBBING ALREADY!
i had never heard of jenny lawson before, but now i can’t stop thinking about her. in a non-creepy way. i think. it’s hard for me to gauge my own creepiness when “enthusiastic” can often come across as “creepy.” i am pretty sure i am just enthusiastic.
and it wasn’t love at first sight. there were a couple of things in the introduction and first essay that made me wince and hope that some of the “look how hard i am trying!!” missteps would be toned down before publication. i have no way of knowing whether they were. well, i do, but i am lazy. but there were still some genuinely funny moments, and i was on board as she recounted episodes from her childhood with her well-meaning taxidermist father and the…gifts and …surprises… he would supply for her and her sister. oh, dear. i mean, a lot of the stories sound wonderful and magical like having goats and porcupines and raccoons just hanging out inside the house, wandering around, but for every story featuring a raccoon in jams, there is a story about accidentally running face-first into the carcass of a deer being hosed down in the backyard. and vomiting. inside the carcass of the deer.
there’s no way to come back from that, really.
i love the fights she has with her long-suffering husband, i love her love of tiny taxidermied animals in period clothing, i love her habit of uncontrollably telling inappropriate stories and lies when cornered at dinner parties, i hate all the deadly things that surround her texas home… except the foxes. greg will like that story.
i love that i laughed so loud and hard at portions of this book that i had to be checked on because “i thought you were screaming.”
i was totally screaming.
and i wet myself a little, too.
it was that good.
i love that she curses as much as i do. and talks about her vagina frequently. in many ways, we are the saaaaaame. we should get a drink together. wait, is that creepy? whatever.
not a perfect book, no, but a book i liked enough that i am going to buy the hardcover because this ARC has blurry pictures that you can barely read the funny captions on, and the hardcover has these amaaazing patterned endpapers with pictures of animals on them. i love it. and i am waiting for the second book.
call me, jenny. let’s taxidermify sloane crosley.
that was definitely creepy. shit.
okay, so i thought i should give you a sense of her lunacy even though you could just go to her blog and see it, and even though it is totally illegal for me to do so since i only have the ARC, but i am kind of banking on the hope that that is one of those mattress-tag laws and no one will actually come and arrest me, although i would love to see what book prison is like. this isn’t one of the passages that made me scream-laugh, but i totally understand her concerns here, and i am frequently startled at the shit we think of…..i like this part mostly because of all the caps and italics and energy jumping off the page….i’ll just throw you right into it:
THIS IS JENNY LAWSON:
also, i just want to say that i think when the doctor is stitching your vagina back up (for real, child-free people: stitching. your. vagina. up.), i don’t know why they don’t throw in some cosmetic surgery while they’re down there, to make it look cuter. like, when my gynecologist told me that she’d probably have to cut my vagina, i was all, “YOU ARE A FUCKING PSYCHOPATH,” and she was like, “not for fun [unspoken: “dumb-ass”]. to get the baby out.” and i said, “oh. well’ if you’re going to have to scar me, could you do it in some kind of kick-ass shape? like, how about a lightning bolt?” and she just stared at me, so i explained, “you know…like harry potter’s?” then she just looked at me like i shit on the floor, and i thought maybe it was because the sentence structure kind of implied i was referring to harry potter’s vagina, and so i clarified: “but not on my forehead like his was.” and she still didn’t respond, so i pointed down and said, “on my vagina” then she shook her head like she’d know all along i wasn’t referring to harry potter’s vagina, and said, “uh, we don’t really do that. in fact, we prefer for you to tear naturally, because it heals better,” and i’m all, “MOTHER. FUCKER. are you fucking serious??” and i kind of suspected she was just making that up because she didn’t want me to have a nicer vagina than hers, because she’s never had a kid and so hers was probably all perfect and cheerful, and she probably didn’t want me rubbing my vagina in her face when it was all lightning-bolt awesome. like i would ever even do that, dr. ryder. i would never rub my vagina in someone’s face, even though it would be the most badass vagina in the world. and whenever i have menstrual cramps i could just pretend that voldemort was close.
