The first time I read “And That’s Why You Should Learn to Pick Your Battles” I had one of those can’t-breathe-you-are-laughing-so-hard moments. A friend had posted a link to this particular blog posting via Facebook. After reading it, I had to find out more about the author, Jenny Lawson aka The Bloggess. It just so happens that The Bloggess does indeed publish a blog, chock full of hilarious/awkward/cringe-inducing personal experiences.
“And That’s Why You Should Learn to Pick Your Battles,” a tale of a large metal chicken named Beyonce(see picture to the left, which was borrowed straight from Ms. Lawson’s blog,) starts out as a simple disagreement between husband and wife over the purchase of new bath towels but quickly develops into a fifteenth wedding anniversary prank gone wrong. As you are reading Ms. Lawson’s blog, you discover fairly early on that her sense of humor does not quite match that of her husband’s. Where she finds the act of placing a five-foot-tall metal chicken at her front door and then gleefully watching her husband’s reaction from afar as he opens said door to the aforementioned chicken perfectly acceptable, her husband’s reaction aptly sums up his opinion of his wife’s sense of humor. He opens the door, sees the chicken, lets out an exasperated sigh and then promptly slams the door in Beyonce’s face. If you want to learn the fate of Beyonce (and Victor and Jenny’s fifteenth wedding anniversary,) please click on the link to Ms. Lawson’s blog that I’ve included above and again here.
You read it and are having your own can’t-breathe-you-are-laughing-so-hard moment? Okay, good. Now let me tell you about Ms. Lawson’s new “memoir” Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir, which is essentially a collection of some her funniest blog posts and misadventures to date. Here’s a book summary from her website:
For fans of Tina Fey and David Sedaris-Internet star Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, makes her literary debut.
When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father (a professional taxidermist who created dead-animal hand puppets) and a childhood of wearing winter shoes made out of used bread sacks. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it.
Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter are the perfect comedic foils to her absurdities, and help her to uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments-the ones we want to pretend never happened-are the very same moments that make us the people we are today.
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir is a poignantly disturbing, yet darkly hysterical tome for every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud. Like laughing at a funeral, this book is both irreverent and impossible to hold back once you get started.
Whether she is writing about her most recent fight with Victor via post-it notes or expounding her love of slightly off-kilter taxidermy (which, let’s face it, taxidermy is pretty much off-kilter to begin with,) Ms. Lawson will have you howling with laughter. I would NOT advise reading this book in public unless you relish weird looks from strangers. Anytime I need to put a bad day behind me, I read one of the Blogess’s stories and feel a little bit better about myself. I’m pretty sure that’s what she was going for when she decided to put her life on the internet and then turn it into a book.
by Anna
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