Author: Jenny Lawson
Genre: Autobiography, Comedy
Rating: A-
I ended up reading Let’s Pretend This Never Happened at least partially by accident. After a bad day I’d gone into my local bookstore and picked up a copy of Jenny Lawson’s memoirs and began to flip through the first chapter, thinking that reading would help quell my temper before I went on with the errands that I had to run – reading tends to have that effect on me. Before I knew it I was sitting in one of the “use for 30 minutes only” chairs mid-way through the seventh chapter and completely hooked on the book. Because I was in public I was trying to do my best to not laugh out loud as I read the stories within these memoirs, resulting in a choked convulsion that amused one of the store clerks greatly – fortunately for me, she’d already read Let’s Pretend and understood just why I was laughing.
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is blogger Jenny Lawson’s first foray into book-writing, and a remarkably revealing one at that. While she does provide the disclaimer in the title that the events described in the book are “mostly true”, she also provides countless pictures throughout the book to support many of her stories and has a way of telling you when she’s not exactly been truthful, resulting in the feeling that ninety per cent of the book is in fact truth. While the bulk of the stories are either hilarious or disturbing (or disturbingly hilarious), others are really moving and heart wrenching; it’s easy to laugh as Lawson describes the time that she artificially inseminated a cow for school, it’s much harder to do so as she describes her many failed pregnancies and the neurosis that she developed as a result.
Lawson balances both cow vaginas and her own with remarkable skill, and uses them and the other stories that she tells to paint a picture of a very neurotic, very real woman who in many ways isn’t all that different from you or I. When reading the individual stories that make up this book you might not be able to say “I’ve done that,” but I’m sure you’ll be able to identify with a lot of the feelings behind it. In many ways this book is almost an ironic depiction of Lawson; she describes herself as this extremely neurotic woman who over thinks even the simplest of social interactions and is constantly having to check herself in order to ensure that she’s fitting into the standards of normalcy projected by mainstream society – and when she fails to hilarity, disaster, and awkwardness ensues – but in her memoirs she reveals the woman that she really is. While I’ve never really read any of her blogs, it makes me wonder if she is as open there as she is in Let’s Pretend.
While I could go on praising Let’s Pretend and go into some of my favourite parts – in addition to the chapter about the cow’s vagina there’s also a lengthy part about how, while working in Human Resources, Lawson repeatedly had to track down male staff and ask them ‘is this your penis’ after they’d sent pictures of their genitalia out over the office email – I should probably point out a few of the more negative points. While I loved the beginning and loved (although, maybe to a lesser extent) the ending, I found the middle to be a bit slow. Lawson spent a lot of time on her anxiety, but the stories there seemed to be repetitive, especially as she detailed the many times that she embarrassed her husband while at one of his work parties. Where Let’s Pretend really shined was in the stories about her family and her friends. The story about when Lawson went with a group of women on a wine tasting was, in my opinion, a perfect example of Lawson’s neurosis but still had the charm of her interacting with people that she cares about and loves – the same cannot be said for the stories of her rambling about serial killers to her husband’s colleagues. While both might be true, one makes her out to be this very real person while the other makes her look just nuts.
Genre: Autobiography, Comedy
Rating: A-
I ended up reading Let’s Pretend This Never Happened at least partially by accident. After a bad day I’d gone into my local bookstore and picked up a copy of Jenny Lawson’s memoirs and began to flip through the first chapter, thinking that reading would help quell my temper before I went on with the errands that I had to run – reading tends to have that effect on me. Before I knew it I was sitting in one of the “use for 30 minutes only” chairs mid-way through the seventh chapter and completely hooked on the book. Because I was in public I was trying to do my best to not laugh out loud as I read the stories within these memoirs, resulting in a choked convulsion that amused one of the store clerks greatly – fortunately for me, she’d already read Let’s Pretend and understood just why I was laughing.
Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is blogger Jenny Lawson’s first foray into book-writing, and a remarkably revealing one at that. While she does provide the disclaimer in the title that the events described in the book are “mostly true”, she also provides countless pictures throughout the book to support many of her stories and has a way of telling you when she’s not exactly been truthful, resulting in the feeling that ninety per cent of the book is in fact truth. While the bulk of the stories are either hilarious or disturbing (or disturbingly hilarious), others are really moving and heart wrenching; it’s easy to laugh as Lawson describes the time that she artificially inseminated a cow for school, it’s much harder to do so as she describes her many failed pregnancies and the neurosis that she developed as a result.
Lawson balances both cow vaginas and her own with remarkable skill, and uses them and the other stories that she tells to paint a picture of a very neurotic, very real woman who in many ways isn’t all that different from you or I. When reading the individual stories that make up this book you might not be able to say “I’ve done that,” but I’m sure you’ll be able to identify with a lot of the feelings behind it. In many ways this book is almost an ironic depiction of Lawson; she describes herself as this extremely neurotic woman who over thinks even the simplest of social interactions and is constantly having to check herself in order to ensure that she’s fitting into the standards of normalcy projected by mainstream society – and when she fails to hilarity, disaster, and awkwardness ensues – but in her memoirs she reveals the woman that she really is. While I’ve never really read any of her blogs, it makes me wonder if she is as open there as she is in Let’s Pretend.
While I could go on praising Let’s Pretend and go into some of my favourite parts – in addition to the chapter about the cow’s vagina there’s also a lengthy part about how, while working in Human Resources, Lawson repeatedly had to track down male staff and ask them ‘is this your penis’ after they’d sent pictures of their genitalia out over the office email – I should probably point out a few of the more negative points. While I loved the beginning and loved (although, maybe to a lesser extent) the ending, I found the middle to be a bit slow. Lawson spent a lot of time on her anxiety, but the stories there seemed to be repetitive, especially as she detailed the many times that she embarrassed her husband while at one of his work parties. Where Let’s Pretend really shined was in the stories about her family and her friends. The story about when Lawson went with a group of women on a wine tasting was, in my opinion, a perfect example of Lawson’s neurosis but still had the charm of her interacting with people that she cares about and loves – the same cannot be said for the stories of her rambling about serial killers to her husband’s colleagues. While both might be true, one makes her out to be this very real person while the other makes her look just nuts.
