Tag Archives: depression

Book Review: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened

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Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson (pub date 4/17/12)

“People with anxiety disorders are often labeled as ‘shy’ or ‘quiet’ or ‘that strange girl who probably buries bodies in her basement.’”

In my recent post about the BEA Bloggers Conference, I wrote about Jenny Lawson’s entertaining and heartfelt closing speech at the conference.  She struck me as one of those people who is just naturally funny, and her delivery and comedic timing cracked me up all throughout her speech.  But even as she discussed more serious issues like her battle with anxiety problems, she still captivated the audience with her honesty and unique perspective on life.  After receiving a copy of her book at the conference, I knew I wanted to read it right away.

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is Lawson’s (mostly true) memoir.  It’s a composite of events from her childhood, stories from her experience as a human resources rep, random arguments with her husband, phobias, and obsessions.  With a poignant wit, she describes growing up poor in rural Texas with a taxidermist father who also enjoyed bringing home live wild animals.  She moves onto meeting her husband Victor and how on the night he proposed she was convinced he was going to kill her.  Later in the book are side-splitting stories from her HR days, and various calamities that you feel bad for laughing at, like the time she had to bury and then exhume her beloved pug Barnaby Jones.

Though humorous at heart, the book has its tender moments as well.  Lawson writes about the misfortunes in her life, like her multiple miscarriages and battle with anxiety disorder, with a voice that lets you know she is using humor to deal with the pain.  She fears going out in public, and when she does her obsession with fitting in causes her to unintentionally make a scene.  Her descriptions of these events are hilarious, but you somehow feel bad for laughing.  Yet in the end it’s OK to laugh, because she is laughing along with you.  Lawson also describes the joys in her life, like the birth of her daughter and her love for her husband.  Moments like these give a lot of substance to the book, and let you know more about who Lawson is as an individual.

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened is probably the funniest memoir you’ll ever read.  With chapter titles like “Stanley the Magical Talking Squirrel,” “If You Need an Arm Condom, It Might Be Time to Reevaluate Some of Your Life Choices,” and “Thanks for the Zombies, Jesus,” you know you’re in for a real treat.  It’s dark, it’s offensive, it’s gross, and it’s also human.  It’s about the moments that we wish we could just forget, but ultimately make us who we are.  It’s definitely not for everyone, but if you have a twisted sense of humor and an appreciation for the macabre, you definitely need to read this book.  And check out Jenny Lawson’s blog The Bloggess, the thing that started it all!

Early Review: The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D

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The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D. by Nichole Bernier (pub date 6/5/12)

“That’s the funny thing about people who don’t fit into a box.  They grow to infiltrate everything, and when they suddenly go missing, they are missing everywhere.”

Who knows you the most?  Is there anyone in your life who knows all of your secrets, your past, your craziest thoughts?  Think about the people in your life closest to you: your spouse/partner, parents, friends.  Is there a part of you that none of them knows?  For some people, the one who knows them the most is not a person but a journal. 

The Unfinished Work of Elizabeth D is about a thirty-something wife and mother named Kate whose best friend Elizabeth died in a plane crash.  Several months after Elizabeth’s death, Kate finds out that Elizabeth had willed her a trunk full of old journals, along with explicit instructions that Kate be the one to read them.  Though she is at first reluctant to read her friend’s private journals, Kate accepts her new duty out of loyalty to Elizabeth.

Kate takes the journals along on her vacation, and quickly discovers an Elizabeth completely unlike the one she thought she knew.  The cheerful, capable Elizabeth was a mere shell, hiding a painful past and crippling depression.  Kate struggles to reconcile her own guilt over not recognizing her friend’s suffering, and also deals with constant inquiries from Elizabeth’s widowed husband Dave about what is in the journals.  Resentful that the journals were given to Kate and not him, Dave has doubts about what his wife was really doing on the day she died.

I really enjoyed this bittersweet debut novel.  Bernier captures all of the joy, angst, and uncertainty that comes with the best friend relationship.  And though Elizabeth’s character is dead all throughout the story, she came alive through the journal entries.  It takes a great writer to make a dead character seem alive, and Elizabeth is a rich and dynamic character, as is Kate.

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoys stories about women’s relationships, and also to anyone who enjoys real-life human drama.  It’s an absorbing and very enjoyable story, and it might make you think about the secrets we all keep, even from our best friend.

Book Review: Mother’s House Payment

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Mother’s House Payment by Ronnie Schiller (Kindle only, 2011)

“Depression follows mania.  A manic person falls like Icarus, plummeting away from the sun into the depths of the sea.”

One of my professors recently said something very simple yet very brilliant about the difference between fiction and nonfiction:  we want our fiction to be realistic and we want our nonfiction, especially memoirs, to be larger than life.  There is some truth to that statement in this short but powerful memoir by the author of the Infernal Stock series.

Mother’s House Payment is the story of Schiller’s own life, and how she struggled to overcome her traumatic childhood.  Born to a mother who never wanted her, Schiller’s childhood is marked by abuse, neglect, and being passed around among parents and step-parents.  Still fighting deep emotional scars in her teen years, she experiences mental illness which leads to self-harm and eventually hospitalization.  As an adult, she finds difficulty in maintaining healthy romantic relationships, and tries to finally break free of her unhappy, co-dependent marriage.

This is not an easy book to read.  It’s raw, gritty, and uncomfortable.  But it’s also very well written, and a story that deserves to be told.  It shows just what happens to victims of abuse when they grow up, the burden they carry with them into adulthood.  And the sad fact is that there are many abuse victims who were not as fortunate as Schiller to have gotten help and turned their lives around. 

Mother’s House Payment is a sad but hopeful memoir, and I give a lot of credit to the author for finding the strength not only to help herself, but to share her story with the world.  The book is currently selling well in the Kindle store, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it got picked up by a larger publisher sometime in the future.

Book Review: Underground Time

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Underground Time by Delphine de Vigan (pub date 11/22/11, Kindle edition 12/1/11)

Underground Time

“Though she had lived for years without thinking about it, today this repetition seems to her like a sort of violence being done to her body, a silent sort of violence capable of destroying her.”

It takes a brilliant author to be able to write something that’s relatable to audiences in another continent.  In Underground Time, French author Delphine de Vigan captures the sense of oppressing isolation experienced by millions of urban dwellers and corporate workers around the world, and expresses it as a microcosm inhabited by two lonely people.

Mathilde is a single mother working as a marketing manager for a large company in Paris.  Though she was once happy and proud to be a part of the corporate machine, she now finds herself the victim of a bullying boss and cruel office politics.  Each day that goes by she finds herself a little more defeated, humiliated, and tired.  On the other side of the city, paramedic Thibault is contemplating his recently ended relationship and the string of events which ended his dream of being a prominent surgeon.  The events of the story all take place in a single day, culminating when these two run into each other in the subway.

This is a book that not everyone will get.  Unless you’ve experienced the thankless monotony of being stuck in a miserable job, you may find it difficult to relate to Mathilde and Thibault’s quiet desperation.  But the writing and characterization in this book are too good to pass up.  The “day in the life” format perfectly fits the feel of the story, and the ending reflects the overall message of the book.  And thankfully, the English translation is easy to follow.

This is a short book that you can read over a weekend, but really packs an emotional punch.  So grab a crossaint and treat yourself to some brilliant French literature!