Let's Pretend This Never Happened

I’m just going to start this review assuming that you know who Jenny Lawson is.  (If you don’t, you owe it to yourself, your loved ones, and the world to google her name and read everything she’s ever written.  NOW.)  This is her life story.  And, lord have mercy on her soul, because this woman has done it all, seen it all, been through it all, and she is still laughing at herself and making us not feel bad when we laugh her, too.

Not her, directly, but at the things that happen to her.  Each chapter is a series of stories, usually in chronological order.  (Except the time her dead cat shows up  in the chapter after he died, which I thought was weird.  Then it was almost like she was in my head because she wrote a caveat about it right as I was thinking it.  Add psychic to her list of talents, apparently.)

The stories start during her childhood in west Texas, where her dad was a taxidermist who used a dead squirrel as a hand puppet, follow her through high school and college, where she meets her eye-rolling, perpetually sighing husband, to her married life on 200 plus acres in the middle of a Native American burial site.  She sheer volume of ridiculousness that follows this woman….there are no words.  She even refers to her own vagina as “wily”.  Yes, she’s got a wily vagina.

Throughout the laugh out loud stories (that really did make me laugh out loud, not just LOL, and in public no less) she also shows us her vulnerable side – her battles with crippling depression, anxiety, a rare form of rheumatoid arthritis, two miscarriages, and the death of her beloved pug.  Yet, these seemingly sad life stories end up not being sad, but also not being annoyingly look on the bright side either.

And she does all of this in a single novel.  That’s quite an accomplishment.