Jenny Lawson had a funny upbringing, said Andrea Burzynski in Reuters.com. Better known by her Internet handle, the Bloggess, Lawson attracts 2 million to 3 million hits per month by using her blog to share laugh-out-loud stories about her life with her husband and their 7-year-old daughter. Her new memoir, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, gets at the source of her humor, her strange West Texas upbringing. Childhood for Lawson involved a pet raccoon she dressed in Jams shorts, a taxidermist father who once took a live donkey to a bar to meet a Teddy Roosevelt impersonator, and a host of taxidermied animal friends. “For them it’s such a normal thing,” she says of her parents. “It doesn’t dawn on them that normal people don’t take donkeys into bars.” The book, she says, will give her fans a “better perspective of exactly why I’m as bizarre as I am.”
Lawson isn’t just another blogger recycling stories for her first book deal, said Rita Arens in BlogHer.com. Most of the tales in Let’s Pretend have never seen the digital realm. And as best as Lawson can remember, they’re all true. “Sadly, I no longer have the baby raccoon,” she says. “Or his magical Jams.” She does, however, still have a taxidermied mouse, named Hamlet von Schnitzel, which she recently took on a plane to New York for the book’s cover shoot. You might say it was a normal thing for her. “It was insane. And awesome,” she says. “The guy sitting next to me would only agree with that first part.”
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