Let's Pretend This Never Happened - Jenny Lawson

Book Specifications:

ISBN: 0399159010 (ISBN13: 9780399159015)

Published April 17th 2012 by Amy Einhorn: Putnam

Hardcover, 318 pages

Original Title: Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir)

Author: Jenny Lawson. This is her first book.

Here’s my fancy reviewer line to put on the book-cover along with my name: All the foibles and fallacies of a funny, f***-saying, freaked-out female in a package.

And don’t blame me if you go punch drunk and giggle when you hear ball-pop or anything like that after reading the book.*giggle*

‘Hilariously inappropriate’ (according to Marie Claire) is I think the best comment to describe this book in a nutshell.

The assortment of characters is pretty interesting and mostly unbelievable (just like real people).

You have a taxidermist/armadillo-racer/dead-squirrel-puppeteer father, a children- learn-and-live-through-risks mother, a patiently all-bearing occasionally crazy husband (make no mistake, this guy is fun...or must be, to bear all the antics) and a sister who’s dressed up as a chicken and best of all, an author.

And some taxidermied animals dressed up in cute costumes...the one on the cover is Hamlet von Schnitzel and I so want him...people who know where to get him, email me.

Don’t let the words memoir or autobiography on the cover put you off, not at all, rather this is the book you should be picking up even before that coveted copy of Bridget Jones(yes even if it is a sale).

After all, what can you expect from a person who is neurotic, polyarthritic, panic-attack-prone and has all the craziest things in the world happen to her?! I’m not kidding; the high point of her high school is sticking her arm up a cow’s vagina.

Yes. I know.

And that’s how I felt throughout the book.

This book is stuffed with oh-my-freaking-pants incidents like that. And it would be advisable to find a place where people don’t mind raucous laughing and choking and snorting because that’s what you’re going to do while reading. Really. I’m seriously worried about that look my brother gave me.

Jenny is only as screwed up as you or me plus a little extra maybe...she did manage to talk about a cow’s vagina during a funeral.

I don’t know what else to say for fear of ruining that first rush of gawky, chokey surprise when you read the book and not because I want to be the irritating reviewer who is all ‘lovely, beautiful, awesome’ and less story. All in all, a perfectly, hilariously, crazily, convoluted general knowledge autobiography (oh don’t be put down, Jenny explains why. In the end. And she’s a blogger. How cool is that??!link)

P.S. Don’t leave it open anywhere for your parents to find. Or your little sister. Or brother. Unless you know how to explain away cusses. If you can then it’s perfectly fine.

Rating: I don’t know how the scale works here but being one of those nothing-is-a-perfect-ten-ever people, I give it a 4/5 plus a big smile? hug? bookmark?...whatever you give a book for making you happy.

Go get it and pre-book the next.