Books Read: Jenny Lawson - Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Source - Received from publisher to review

Every teenager wants to fit in and be just like everybody else. So imagine how hard that is when your father runs a taxidermy business out of the family home, your mother runs the student cafeteria, and your sister has just been elected high school mascot, which means she walks the halls in a giant bird costume. But as Jenny Lawson grows up, falls in love, gets engaged – in a way that is as disastrous as it is romantic – and starts a family of her own, she learns that life’s most absurd and humiliating moments, the ones we wish we could pretend had never happened, are the very same moments that make us who we are. 

This is an often poignant, sometimes disturbing, but always hilarious book from a writer that dares to say your deepest and strangest thoughts out loud. Like laughter at a funeral, it is both highly irreverent and impossible to stop once you’ve started . . .

This book arrived in the post out of the blue, I'm assuming from Picador books, and at first I wasn't sure what to expect from it.

It's fair to say from the accounts in the book that Jenny's family are a pretty eccentric bunch of characters but who knows how much of the stories are true to life or whether these have been embellished to make a good story!  The tagline on the front says it all really 'A Mostly True Memoir'.

The book is written very much in a blog format and it's fair to say that no topic was off-limit within the book, some of which made me cringe but I still couldn't stop myself reading, and that she has used her humour to talk about some of the most painful events in her life, anorexia, miscarriages, crippling depression and anxiety moments.  But some of the best moments throughout the book were the recollections of conversations with her husband, it's clear to see that he loves her despite her quirky behaviour. 

Personally this book is not really my type of read especially as there is a lot of cursing throughout but if you're a fan of Jenny's blog, The Bloggess, then you'll probably enjoy reading it.