Skewed perspective + sense of ridiculous = laugh-out-loud life

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Jenny Lawson pushes boundaries with her humour.

Book review

Let's Pretend This Never Happened

• (A Mostly True Memoir)
• By Jenny Lawson
• Amy Einhorn / Penguin, 336 pages, $28

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Let's be clear. If you don't like vulgarity, excessive profanity, sentence fragments or run-on sentences, you will not like Texas journalist and blogger Jenny Lawson's first book.

If bizarre tales about giant metal chickens named Beyoncé, stuffed Cuban alligators, random thoughts taken out of context and leaps of logic aren't up your alley, stay clear.

But if you don't mind a skewed world perspective, combined with a keen sense of the ridiculous and excellent timing that will make you laugh out loud, then Let's Pretend This Never Happened may be for you.

Lawson, best known as "The Bloggess," joins a who's who of pop culture bloggers given book deals, among them Americans Drew Magarry, Julie Powell and Neil Pasricha and Canadian Kelly Oxford.

The cover is the first hint that this is no ordinary memoir. The tiny white mouse dressed in an Elizabethan ruffled collar and red velvet robe and holding a mouse skull is from Lawson's personal collection of antique taxidermy.

Lawson, 38, begins with stories of growing up in rural west Texas with her impetuous taxidermist father, her patient mother, sunny little sister and a variety of random pets, including a duck that got eaten by hobos, pant-wearing raccoons and the odd bobcat.

For Lawson, the moments you wish had never happened are the ones that most define you and make you who you are.

"You are defined not by life's imperfect moments, but by your reaction to them," she writes. "Because there is joy in embracing -- rather than running screaming from -- the utter absurdity of life."

She eventually graduates from college, marries her long-suffering husband Victor and has her daughter, Hailey. She works for 15 years in human resources, where her duties included (most ironically) teaching professionalism and appropriate work behaviour.

The book is a balance between autobiographical chapters and the occasional blog post, with enough new material for regular fans and enough classic moments for new readers.

This includes the story of Beyoncé the giant metal chicken, which she purchased on sale to teach her husband when to pick his battles and which now lives in the trees in the back yard to scare away snakes.

The detailed (and possibly imaginary) arguments she's had with her husband are also particularly entertaining, especially where she is driving around lost or wrapping the dishwasher in a comforter to contain the bubbles from using laundry detergent instead of dish detergent.

Lawson definitely pushes boundaries with her humour, sometimes edging into the awkward, the uncomfortable or the inappropriate. The non sequiturs tend to outnumber the focused sentences and break up the flow of the story she's trying to tell.

It's her humour and honesty that keep the reader along for the ride. She doesn't shy away from talking about her severe anxiety issues and depression, anorexia or her miscarriages. She talks candidly about her worries about not fitting in, about being too odd or too crazy.

All in all, this is a wonderfully indecorous and decidedly strange memoir about a quirky woman with a knack for seeing the hilarious in everyday life.

Julie Kentner is a Winnipeg writer who has a Beyoncé of her own in her garden.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 28, 2012 J8