"Let's Pretend This Never Happened" by Jenny Lawson (2012)

When Nico saw the title of this one he asked you the difference between a memoir and a biography. "I honestly don't know," you told him. "But thumbing through this one, I would guess that a memoir is an autobiography where you get to tell actually funny stories and say bad words a lot."

You still don't know the actual difference and you could totally look it up on google, but where is the mystery in that?

The author of this book is Jenny Lawson, but she's much more commonly known as "The Bloggess." She is a blogger who you and Liz have been following on Twitter for years and she is absolutely hilarious. Jenny has a style of writing that seamlessly mixes fragments with run-on sentences in the most disarming way. Her comic timing is impeccable and startling. Her liberal and creative use of paragraph structure and footnotes is surprising enough that you were actually laughing out loud from the first page of the book. Plus she cusses like a thirteen year old boy and has no compunction talking about her vagina, her social awkwardness, or her unique upbringing in rural West Texas.

"Let's Pretend This Never Happened" follows a roughly chronological course, but Jenny does not apologize if she zips forward twenty years in the middle of a paragraph to relate a modern anecdote that reminds her of the story she is telling (even if she is the only one who sees any relation between the two stories). The book is brutally frank about her hilariously traumatizing childhood as the daughter of a taxidermist with one seriously warped sense of humor, her crippling social anxiety disorder, and her... just oddness. If you had to use only one word to describe "Let's Pretend This Never Happened," other than 'hilarious' or 'vagina-rific,' it would be honest.

Like most of us, Jenny uses humor to deal with the difficulties of life. What's more, she has found that comfortable place that many of us are also lucky to have found where she draws strength from her own weirdness. Instead of being ashamed of her refusal to fit into arbitrary social categories, she has embraced her unconventional view of the world and used it to show her few hundred thousand Twitter followers and who knows how many readers of this book that the world is not scripted. To hell with what other people think you should do for a living, or useless gender role expectations, or what is considered acceptable dinner conversation. In refusing to be defeated by her strange childhood, by her social anxiety disorder, by her arthritis, or by multiple miscarriages, Jenny reminded you that you refused to be defeated by an absent father, by other people's ridiculous expectations, by your arthritis, by Lincoln's Down syndrome, or by multiple miscarriages. "Because you are defined not by life's imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them. Because there is joy in embracing -rather than running screaming from- the utter absurdity of life."

Last week, Nico was very excited to tell you that his 2nd grade class has been told that they will be writing their own memoirs this year. You sincerely look forward to reading that, and you can only hope that he can find something like Jenny's honesty and wisdom in how he views the world and his place in it... and that he doesn't say "fuck" as much as she does.




On to the next book!