Let's Pretend This Never Happened

Isn't that such a great title?  Too bad I didn't come up with it!  "Let's Pretend This Never Happened" is a mostly true memoir about and by Jenny Lawson,

Have you ever been on a bus, or sitting around somewhere and you hear people's conversations, and you wish you could write this down because seriously?  This is going on?  That is basically what this book is, except it happened to the author AND she wrote it down into a nice mostly consecutive order.  And it is so goddamn funny!  Like, seriously funny.  This is one of the only novels that I have ever read that probably had me laughing throughout most of it.  And don't get me wrong, not at her, well kind of at her, but at the situations that she has been in throughout her life.  For example, her dad is a taxidermist, and this resulted in her playing with a lot of dead animals as a child, which kind of grew to a weird obsession in her later years.  Not with any gross taxidermy stuff, but like the mouse in clothes on the cover of her book.  She decided/has decided to collect small taxidermic animals that have some sort of anthropomorphic feeling to them.

I don't want to give too much away, but it's interesting how Jenny juxtaposes stuff that happened in her life.  Like she had an eating disorder when she was younger, which she acknowledges, but she talks about it in a way that is not "oh pity me," but more like, "man that was stupid."

Anyway, I read this book a while ago, and thought it would be a good holiday read for anyone with a few hours to themselves.  Heck you could probably even turn it into a family affair, although there are some parts that are more PG13.

Happy reading, and remember, share this with your friends!