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.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
Also of interest...in picture books for grown-upsfeature How About Never—Is Never Good for You?; The Undertaking of Lily Chen; Meanwhile, in San Francisco; The Portlandia Activity Book
-
Author of the week: Karen Russell
feature Karen Russell could use a rest.
-
The Double Life of Paul de Man by Evelyn Barish
feature Evelyn Barish “has an amazing tale to tell” about the Belgian-born intellectual who enthralled a generation of students and academic colleagues.
-
Book of the week: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt by Michael Lewis
feature Michael Lewis's description of how high-frequency traders use lightning-fast computers to their advantage is “guaranteed to make blood boil.”
-
Also of interest...in creative rebellion
feature A Man Called Destruction; Rebel Music; American Fun; The Scarlet Sisters
-
Author of the week: Susanna Kaysen
feature For a famous memoirist, Susanna Kaysen is highly ambivalent about sharing details about her life.
-
You Must Remember This: Life and Style in Hollywood’s Golden Age by Robert Wagner
feature Robert Wagner “seems to have known anybody who was anybody in Hollywood.”
-
Book of the week: Astoria: John Jacob Astor and Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire by Peter Stark
feature The tale of Astoria’s rise and fall turns out to be “as exciting as anything in American history.”