Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson

5 hilariously truthful stars!

 

I know, I read her books backwards… I read Furiously Happy before Let’s Pretend This Never Happened.  Honestly though it didn’t matter.  Jenny Lawson is the queen of telling a mostly truthful, hilarious, albeit somewhat painful book.  She also has a blog that if you would like to follow can be found @TheBloggess.com

If you don’t know who Jenny Lawson is, she is a blogger who doesn’t shelter you from her day to day dealings with life, living with depression, anxiety disorder, and etc.  She grew up in a non conformable way. While to her it seemed normal, to us it seems down right hilarious/dangerous. Her family is a little corky, but definitely loves her, and she loves them. Then enters her new bea  Victor.. and he loves her corkiness just as much as her family does.

This book follows Jenny about the time she meets Victor and everything that happens afterwards.  I have to say I LOVE the parts of the book where poor Victor always seems to time his speaker phone conference calls wrong.  Jenny is always busting in saying something completely outrageous. This book is just as good as the other one, I loved seeing the insight into how their little family has developed over the years.  How her love of “stuffed” creatures began.  The relationship between Jenny and Victor reminds me of my husband and myself.  How he tries to be so patient with my craziness.. As with Furiously Happy I found myself really relating to Jenny and her anxiety/depression problems.  We may not all have the same symptoms or meds but we are all trying.  Her books while entertaining send a powerful message.  DO NOT GIVE UP.  We all have those days… the days where the metal illness is beating you down.  Don’t let it win… I for one will talk to anyone who needs me.  Via email, messenger or whatever.  Never be afraid to speak out to someone if you need help.  I know that’s half the battle.

Don’t get me wrong there is a ton of humor in this book.  With a dash of reality every once in a while. I highly suggest this book to anyone who has or knows of someone with a mental illness.  This topic needs to be less stigmatized, mental illness is not something to joke about.  Millions of people every day struggle with their disorders, we need to pick them up instead of making them a punch line.

Here is a little humor part of the book…

 

“Oh, I’m just fine, thanks. Please get the hell back in the truck.”

He glared at me and shook his head. “Have a little faith, will ya?” He knelt down beside the rattler. “It’s dead. Looks like its head was crushed.”

“awesome. Now get the hell back in the truck.”

Victor ignored me as he put on a glove and stooped to pick up the tail of the five-foot rattle. “We should bring this home to your dad. He could probably—OHJESUSCHRIST!”

It was at this exact moment that the “dead” rattlesnake suddenly started angrily striking at Victor’s leg. Uncoincidentally, it was also the exact same moment that I ducked back into the truck, taking the spotlight with me and leaving Victor in the pitch-dark blackness on an abandoned road, as the angry rattlesnake he was holding tried to murder him.

“BRING BACK THE LIGHT,” he screamed.

“I TOLD YOU NOT TO GO OUT THERE!” I yelled angrily, as I quickly locked the doors (for some reason) and rolled up all the windows. I was worried about him and wanted to help him, but I couldn’t help but htink that he had brought this on himself.

“BRING BACK THE LIGHT OR I WILL THROW THIS DAMN SNAKE IN THE CAR WITH YOU,” he screamed, which surprising, both because he sounded very vital for someone dying of snakebite, and also because he’d wrongly assumed that I hadn’t automatically locked all the doors. He knows so little about me, I thought to myself.

 

This part is a little more serious…

I know other people who are like me. They take the same drugs as me. They try all the therapies. They are brilliant and amazing and forever broken. I’m lucky that although Victor doesn’t understand it, he tries to understand, telling me, “Relax. There’s absolutely nothing to panic about.” I smile gratefully at him and pretend that’s all I needed to hear and that his is just a silly phase that will pass one day. I know there is nothing to panic about. And that’s exactly what makes it so much worse.

 

Goodreads link here

 

book blurb…

Paperback, 370 pages

Published March 5th 2013 by Penguin Group (USA) (first published April 17th 2012)

Original Title

Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir)

ISBN 0425261018 (ISBN13: 9780425261019)

When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it.

In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives.