Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir by Jenny Lawson, The Bloggess

Do you follow The Bloggess?  Wait.  Don’t answer that aloud.  The woman has over 240,000 Twitter followers, and her blog averages over a half a million hits per month.  That means if you admit that you don’t follow The Bloggess you might end up feeling lonely and left out.  So as she says, “let’s pretend this never happened”.  Just get on over to Google and find her blog. (Um, or click on that handy link.)

Or you could do as I did and read her book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir.

I guffawed, I sniffled, I quoted.

Jenny Lawson,
The Bloggess

Seriously, this woman is hilarious.  And she breaks my heart.  And at one point, I realized that if I didn’t stop marking passages to quote directly in my review that I wouldn’t ACTUALLY be reviewing the book, but would, instead, merely be reading it to you. *

*Well, not really.  There’s no audio here.  But it’s LIKE I’m reading it to you because I’m pointing out all the parts that I would have read to you if we were in the same room.  Basically, it’s all the parts I read aloud to my sister—whether she wanted me to or not.

I should probably also point out that if you’re uncomfortable with the f-bomb, it’s possible that reading Jenny’s blog or book might cause you some discomfort.  Also, if you’re uncomfortable with irreverence or taxidermy OR an irreverence for taxidermy, it’s possible that Jenny’s writing isn’t for you.

Everyone else?  Get on over here or here.  Now.

Where else can you find passages like this?

“I countered that it didn’t seem “common” to have to protect your dead dog by going after a vulture with a machete.  My mom said, “Don’t be ridiculous.  Where would a vulture get a machete?”  Not because she was stupid, mind you . . .  simply because she didn’t see this emergency as important enough for me to start using sloppy sentence construction.”

Why are you even finishing this review?  This books contains a story about protecting a pet’s grave from scavengers that MADE ME LAUGH OUT LOUD.  Not, of course, as the grief or the loss, but because Jenny’s mother is so right; emergencies are not an excuse for poor communication.  Emergencies, by their very nature, make the case for proper speech.  Who wants to stop in the middle of a 911 call to clarify?  The clock is ticking during a crisis, after all.*

*And, of course, I’m a grammando—a grammar commando.  So it’s possible that quote is a matter of personal taste. Nah.  It’s damn funny.

Tucked in with chapters that made me laugh until I cried are some passages that just made me want to cry.  The Bloggess doesn’t hold much back so amidst the stories of her unconventional childhood and work history in HR are stories about her personal struggles with general anxiety disorder, OCD, and rheumatoid arthritis.  Thus, my comment about her breaking my heart.  She’s so witty and funny, and she touches (metaphorically, of course) so many people that it hurts ME to think about how much she hurts on an on-going basis.  But that little hurt makes the guffaws that much sweeter. 

Yes, that's a taxidermied mouse.
His name is Hamlet Von Schnitzel.

So read Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.  It’s your best chance to read a book that is 

“intellectually challenging and chronologically surreal. Like if Memento was a book.  About dead dogs and vaginas and puppets made of squirrel corpses.”