Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir

Having a bad day? Rough week? Need a laugh? You can’t go wrong by picking up this book. The way she writes and the way it sucks you in.. I am not a laugh out loud person unless it’s really funny, I don’t try to be a critic I guess it just takes more to make me laugh and she not only succeeded but she excelled at making me laugh!

I was clinically depressed when I read Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. (Not because of the book, obviously; because there weren't enough chemicals in my brain or something.) I was also unmedicated. I was skipping several of my college classes a week, eating mostly garlic bread, and sleeping for about twelve hours a day. Incidentally, I was also reading a lot of books, because this involved lying on the couch for hours at a time but still managed to feel vaguely productive. I’m not trying to say that Let’s Pretend This Never Happened magically cured my depression, painted rainbow unicorns behind my eyelids and made me run a marathon. It didn’t. But it did manage to break through the haze and make me laugh quite a lot, something I cannot say of much during that period of my life (including Parks and Recreation, bad horror movies, and most of my friends). Let’s Pretend This Never Happened grew from Lawson’s popular blog “The Bloggess” in which she details her adventures as a mother, writer, and accidental taxidermy enthusiast. The narrative essays in her memoir read like a conversation with a friend. Only a really funny friend who’s funnier than your real friends. How your conversations would go if you were friends with cool people, like Tina Fey or Anna Kendrick or Jon Stewart or something. Lawson is willing to share the most ridiculous moments of her life, and they are brimming with glee and frankness. I originally wanted to include an extensive list of some of my favorites here, but I think it's better for Jenny to tell you about most of them herself. Just a tiny taste: she writes about one of her family's turkeys following her to school and making her husband buy her a taxidermied boar’s head she names James Garfield. Trust me, these are only scratching the surface. One of the most impressive things that Lawson accomplishes is using her humor to negotiate intimate human tragedy. She opens the chapter about her miscarriages with, “Okay, get prepared, because this chapter is kind of depressing and is about dead babies. I know. Ew.” When she talks about her anxiety, she details the embarrassing and jarring things she has said at parties, such as “I was stabbed in the face by a serial killer.” (Note: She wasn’t actually stabbed by a serial killer in the face.) It is obvious that humor is the lens through which Lawson feels comfortable talking about these topics, and instead of depersonalizing her, it manages to do the opposite. Instead of seeing Lawson as either an inhuman joke machine or a vat of depressing anecdotes, she is just a person, and one that we can deeply identify with at that. This is what kept her on the periphery of my subconscious long after I finished the book. I laughed aloud more times while reading Let’s Pretend This Never Happened than I did during David Sedaris’s Me Talk Pretty One Day, Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? combined. And I love those books.

Jenny Lawson’s book is comedy first, memoir second; the trains of thought free wheeling and hilarious. She loves a good rant and likes to protest against her “editor’s” suggestions. She has false chapters and enjoys intentionally blending the line between fact and fiction. She has fun with her writing and she does so in laugh out loud fashion. It tells of her life growing up in rural Texas and all of her animal encounters. Her father was a taxidermist and was always stopping his truck to pick up dead raccoons off the side of the road. They had many alive animals as well—waking up to her father bringing a bobcat into the bedroom wasn’t uncommon. There were dogs and cats and chickens and goats and foxes and squirrels and bats and snakes and many more. Her mother was a bookkeeper and was a stern and stable figure who reacted to all of her husband’s ridiculous antics as if they were totally normal. Lawson marries a man named Victor when she’s 24 and has a daughter and a family of her own. They move to Houston, and she thinks she’s escaped from the craziness of rural Texas. However, after a few years pass by, a part of her begins to miss it. Her sister, who also had a wild childhood, seems to miss it as well. There aren’t as many animals in the city and they feel cut off from their parents and their upbringing. Eventually they move back and recreate their eccentric childhood for their own children, this time with Grandpa and Grandma in the mix, Beneath the comedic surface Lawson struggles with mental illness and she’s open about it in her stories. She reflects on how her childhood depression led to eating disorders and bulimia and how her adult anxiety makes her word vomit horrible stories at parties. Thankfully, she has developed a sense of humor, however dark, as her coping mechanism and her shield. She channels it into her writing well (both in her books and on her blog). She writes about connection and loneliness and family dynamics in a way that we can all relate toH and her stories are charming and off the wall and embrace their weirdness. The book is both an exploration and a reflection of how absurd life can be. It should be served with a coke.

absolutely love it! i dont ever read but if i do. my fiend would let me borrow it read through this like 10 times in the last couple years so i had to get my own copy. uall enjoy. this is 1 funny book

This book was absolutely what I needed in my life at this exact moment! At a point in life where there was less and less hope, this book came across to me by sheer accident and I’m forever grateful to the stranger in a FB book group for suggesting this. Jenna is raw, real, poignant, and above all exactly what everyone needs in an author!! From the beginning to the end she had me in tears; laughing so loudly that my fiancé had to come check on me; laughing so hard that I’m pretty sure I did the equivalent of a thousand crunches and a million Kiegels (said fiancé is thankful)! Please read this book for ANY reason at all. Jenna will not disappoint and had me purchasing any other book I could find of hers at obscene hours of the morning when I just could not stop until “I finished this paragraph…”continuously!! Her stories of her childhood and family growing up will have you believing every messed up thing you dealt with was a cake walk and poor Victor. Sometimes he is that POW and others he should have just listened to his wife from the beginning! I can’t wait for 20 more years when Hailey writes her first non and the hilarity ensues!! Jenna and Victor have created a beautiful life for Hailey (Chupacabras, scorpions, foxen and all) and she will be the better off for it!! In short, run to get this in any format you can! Pay whatever the cost and enjoy every hilarious paragraph!! I know this is a book I will come back to at the hardest, saddest, and best moments in my life! Jenna, you simply amaze!

I really wanted to love this book because it came highly recommended by a dear friend. Her and I rarely ever disagree, but this might just be one of those times. To be fair, she did say to get the audiobook, but I was out of credits and already a third of the way through! Maybe that would’ve made a difference. While there were definitely parts of this book where I laughed so hard I had tears running down my face (e.g., ending up shoulder deep in a cow’s vagina, repeatedly asking “is this your penis?”), the majority of this book was not funny to me. I’m typically a book a day to every other day reader, and it took me twelve days to read this. It felt like one giant run-on sentence. I thought it very odd that she put so much emphasis on pointing out how weird it was to have whole pieces of furniture just for guns. I’ve never even been to TX, but I grew up in a military family who were also hunters and antique dealers. Gun safes (or “cabinets”) for days!! I also live in the suburbs just outside of a major city and we have “foxen” constantly roaming. The weirdest part to me was that she thought these things were weird. I’d like to also add that I have my own wide array of health issues (mental & physical), and I think mine just don’t connect with hers.

Jenny Lawson has a way with words, the most irreverently offbeat sense of humour and a perspective that she so generously shares, despite the incredible burden that it really is. There are very few books that I laugh-cry-laugh through, getting the best abdominal workout ever. It's at it's best when shared with a friend, while clutching your sides and shrieking with laughter...right before you fall into that silent laughter, where you're laughing so hard that you can't breathe and no sound comes out, and it sort of feeds on itself, so that when you eventually recover and are able to get back to your place on the page, you realize you hadn't even reached the punchline yet. However, amidst the laughter and the tears is the very serious and very real experience of an exceptionally courageous woman baring her soul and her neuroses and mental landscape with such glaring and insightful honesty that it is also truly humbling. You're either going to find yourself a whole lot more appreciative that your crazy isn't as much a burden, or you're going to find out that you're not the only one in the world who has a whole lot more baggage to haul than everyone else does and that sadly, life is not fair, often unpleasant and, quite frankly, most of it you just have to either laugh or cry through. Most of us would just cry, so Jenny, being able to laugh and make us laugh with her (never at her) is an incredibly beautiful soul indeed. May I also say, severe admiration and kudos to her husband, who does make appearances, another unsung hero (well, truly appreciated by Jenny)... but basically a regular guy with a great heart who, like so many in life who rise each morning to the unforeseen challenges lying ahead, does his best to meet them and make it through. I loved this so much that I automatically bought "Furiously Happy" - the second book. Bonding with my family has never been so much fun or so easy. Same for counting blessings, broadening one's compassion and seeing this world from a whole new crazy angle.

Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson is a very irreverent look at her life so far. Known as "The Bloggess"online Lawson first made her impact through her blog before writing a book that included many of her stories. This collection of mostly true and certainly embellished stories run the gamut from brutally honest to exaggerated to fabricated. You should be able to figure out what's real and what isn't. Let's Pretend This Never Happened was making the book blogging rounds when it was first released and most of the reviews I read were raving about how funny she is and compared her to David Sedaris’s Naked. I must admit that I enjoyed Sedaris's books more. While she is funny, much of the humor and language definitely deserves an R rating and was almost just too far over the top several times. It also seems less story teller based and much more frantic one liners that may or may not lead up to a good story. There are moments when Lawson isn't relying on crude jokes and is legitimately sharing where she shines. This is generally when she is talking about a real life experience and not trying to tell us a story to prove how messed up she is. Hey, we all have our issues and it helps to laugh about them. I'd highly recommend this, as long as you are fully aware that it is only for mature audiences. Quotes: Usually when I tell people my dad was a Texas armadillo racing champion, they assume I’m exaggerating, but then I pull out his silver armadillo championship ring (which is, of course, shaped like an armadillo), and then they’re all, “Crap on a crap cracker, you’re actually serious.” And then they usually leave quickly. Page 17 There are few advantages to growing up poor, and not having money for therapy is the biggest. Page 23 High school is life’s way of giving you a record low to judge the rest of your life by. Page 55 Most bloggers are emotionally unstable and are often awkward in social situations, which is why so many of us turned to blogging in the first place. Page 171