Tag Archives: memoir

Everything Is Perfect When You’re a Liar By Kelly Oxford

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Everything Is Perfect When You’re a Liar By Kelly Oxford

everything is perfect when you're a liar

Hilarious! (And more than slightly inappropriate at times, which makes it all the more hysterical!) As a huge fan of the quickly expanding women’s comedy-memoir genre, I was excited to see Everything is Perfect When You’re a Liar, by Kelly Oxford, pop up on one of the many book recommendation websites I follow. Instantly, I downloaded and dug into this non-fictional series of essays about Oxford’s dramatic childhood, often mortifying teen years and beyond.

While I am not sure how she ever convinced her parents to let her to go LA, as a seventeen year old, for a long weekend, reading about her adventures over that 72 hour period made me giggle more than once. Why not accept a ride from someone you met on the just-budding, new invention called the internet? He has a car; you need a ride. Sounds perfect! And when that works out (by works out, I mean you don’t get killed and dumped on the side of the road), why not meet up with another random LA-er, this one being a woman who claims to know Leonardo DiCaprio- your sole reason for being in LA? And when she turns out to eat more laxatives than actual food, why not ditch her in search of some late night pizza? Oh yeah, and how about tying up the weekend with a glittery bow of Las Vegas, with two more strangers? Sounds like a normal weekend for a seventeen year old if you ask me.

Oxford’s humor runs the gamut from situations infused with sheer mortification (peeing her pants in a gas station) to horrifyingly awful decisions (pretending to be homeless to get a free plane ride after spending the last of her money on weed) to ones more relatable to readers with kids (son barfing, repeatedly, on Disney ride after Disney ride, but still insisting on downing corndogs and churros.)

Throughout the book, each chapter stands on its own as a single tale of ridiculousness, embarrassment or slight insanity, but when put together as a whole, build the blocks of a life of one misguided adventure after another, starting with childhood and working up through Oxford’s current state as a wife, mother and continued maker of bad (yet enormously entertaining) bad decisions.

The thing is, this series of essays is hilarious because it is so over-the-top! Some readers will be horribly offended by some of the stories she fesses up to, but those are the same folks who also won’t be stifling laughs at Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson or Girl Walks into a Bar by Rachel Dratch. Kelly Oxford’s Everything is Perfect if You’re a Liar is the perfect read for an airport (if you don’t mind being looked at oddly as you muffle your inescapable laughter) or a day at the beach (which might be better, as you can blame the giggles on a Speedo-clad leathery old man sighting) and earns:

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Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lauren Drain with Lisa Pulitzer

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Banished: Surviving My Years in the Westboro Baptist Church by Lauren Drain with Lisa Pulitzer

banished

It’s hard to imagine how someone could be a part of a group that held as radically negative views as the Westboro Baptist Church, but to choose to join the group after having lived a “normal” life is even more incomprehensible. And yet, it happened to Lauren Drain when she was a teenager and her dad made the life-altering shift from being a perpetual college student to a minion for Pastor Phelps. In Banished, Drain tells, with the help of Lisa Pulitzer, of how her life went from school sports and hanging out with friends to one of weekends picketing the funerals of fallen soldiers and not being able to speak to boys.

For a young lady who has every reason to be bitter, as her teenage years were spent within the confines of a community who ridiculed her every choice, made her feel as though the slightest mistake would send her to the burning fires of Hell and wouldn’t allow even a clarifying question when it came to doctrine, Drain’s book is remarkably even-handed. I expected much more anger from someone who spent her formative years within the Westboro Baptist Church, but instead, it seems Drain has used her book as a bit of therapy, working through the issues that remain.

What I was most interested in learning from the book was more about the belief system of this church that is so often portrayed on the nightly news. I couldn’t fathom how a group of people could abide by ideas that were so anger-filled and purported a god who was so wrathful as to cheer the deaths of small children and patriotic soldiers. After reading the whole thing, I can’t honestly say I have much more of a grasp on it. While I now know the doctrines being taught by Phelps and his followers, understanding is far from mine. The teaching conflict with one another, saying that God has pre-ordained a certain number of people to enter Heaven and only those will be “saved” and then turning around and preaching that all must pray for forgiveness and atonement. But, if one is already set on the path to Hell before even being born, why bother? It doesn’t make much sense, and yet his followers trail behind him, spouting the same vitriol at their numerous pickets.

As far as writing goes, the book is a very straight-forward narrative of her family’s path to and within the Westboro Baptist Church. The book is a quick read and gives an interesting “inside” view of the inner working of the church and its congregation. Banished by Lauren Drain and Lisa Pulitzer is dynamic enough to overcome the rather bland writing (it isn’t bad writing, but it also doesn’t do much other than tell a story chronologically), earning:

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Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds by Ping Fu, MeiMei Fox

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Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds by Ping Fu, MeiMei Fox

Ping Fu’s story is, sadly, not a unique one, at least as far as her time in China is concerned. Where she breaks from the masses is with how she turned those struggles and her horrific treatment into values that pushed her to succeed in the US, a world away from where she was raised. She takes trials that could break even the toughest spirit and finds a way to graceful transition that pain into determination and success.

 

I loved the organization of this book. Ping Fu (along with MeiMei Fox) interweave the stories of her childhood in China with her experiences in the US, not telling a chronological tale, but rather a story of cause and effect. This distinctive take on the memoir helps make the book stand out from all of the other personal stories on the market today that go from playful childhood to adolescent angst to adult trials and tribulations and finally some sort of personal triumph.

 

While Ping Fu’s story of her time in China fascinated me, and I enjoyed her early years in America, I do have to say that the discussions of the 3D technology left me wanting more. Maybe it is my lack of technological prowess, but even with the explanations, I had a hard time picturing exactly what it is she was creating. The other part of the book that didn’t resonate with me was this desire to start a company, any company. Entrepreneurship is a keystone of the American dream, but I always imagined that folks who started companies did so because they loved the product it created; they had a passion for whatever created the foundation of the company. But for Ping Fu, it was almost as if she wanted to get in on the dot.com boom, regardless of the product. Over time, I felt like she came to be truly invested in her 3D design, but that it wasn’t the reason for the company. And maybe this is true of many small business people- that it is about being in business, not which one specifically.

 

The thing that most impresses me about Ping Fu is her attitude. If anyone has a right to be angry and bitter, it is her. And yet, throughout the book, she never talks ill of her birth country. She recognizes the bad- there is no glossing over that, but she reconciles the anger and uses that passion to push herself to greatness. The same can be said of her business contacts. While she doesn’t sugar coat the world of technology and we see her frustrations with certain people/events, she never speaks badly of those people, choosing instead to take the high road and look at situations from a variety of viewpoints.

 

This book is an interesting mix of personal memoir and business self-help, but ultimately, it works. I would have like to see more of a focus on her childhood and early days in the US, as for me those were the most interesting parts, but I can see where other readers would be drawn to the details of technology and entrepreneurship. Ping Fu’s Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds, earns a solid 3 shells!

(With the computer difficulties I am having, I can’t find a way to actually put three shells on the page. Here is one…imagine the others!)

 

 

MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend by Rachel Bertsche

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MWF Seeking BFF: My Yearlong Search for a New Best Friend by Rachel Bertsche

Friendship is a tricky thing. When you are young, it is all about who lives in your neighborhood or who is in your class at school. Kids, for the most part, are good at finding connections within those preset groups. One you get in to middle school and high school, friendships are much more chosen. Kids look outside the few houses surrounding theirs or their homeroom and seek out kids in the school with similar interests or backgrounds. And by college, while your dorm mate might be your BFF for the first few weeks, you quickly find others who are studying the same things, involved in the same activities or hanging at the same places as you do. Your friendship net is able to cast much wider than ever before.  But, by the time we get to be adults, it seems like we lose a bit of our ability to automatically connect the way we did as kids. It can make finding friends, especially close ones, tough to do.

That’s the premise that Rachel Bertsche started with in MWF Seeking BFF. She was new to Chicago and looking for girl friends. She had a wonderful husband, but wanted the chit-chat, reruns of Glee and mani/pedi dates for which a husband just doesn’t cut it. With the need for new girl friends, Bertsche went on a year-long quest to add to her friend Rolodex. She committed to “date” fifty-two girls over the course of the year, hoping to make some genuine connections along the way.

When I first picked up MWF Seeking BFF, I thought I was in for another blogger turned memoirist book. (I have to admit, I love this up and coming genre.  There is something to be said for someone who gains a huge following online and then is able to translate it on the printed page.) And the book is a memoir, but it is more than that. There is a touch of self-help thrown in and a whole lot of research on friendships, along with the humor and storytelling that I prize in these types of books.

Initially I was very turned off by the research included in the book. To me, “memoir” doesn’t scream quotation citation and reference checks. And, to be honest, Bertsche’s use of the research is a little choppy at times. There were moments, mostly early in the book, that I felt like I was reading the world’s longest 8th grade research paper. (Believe me, I’ve read enough of those to know what I am talking about.) The transitions from her story to the quotes by scientists and sociologists were not always the smoothest. It felt like she was told her had to have a certain number of citations, and by golly, she was going to get them.

But, once I got used to this rather unique writing style, I really tuned in to the book and enjoyed it. Rachel Bertsche is just a few years younger than I am, and having recently moved to the other side of the world, (with many more such moves in my future) I get where she is coming from. At 30-something, it isn’t easy to leave behind your BFFs and make new friends, to basically start over in the friend department.  I found her discussion of different levels of friends to be spot-on and her tales of breaking the ice with new person after new person sounded rather familiar to me.

This book was originally recommended to me by one of the members of my book club in Washington DC (and fellow blogger in the world of Foreign Service- you can check out her adventures in Mexico City here), and would have been the *perfect* read for a book club. After finishing it, I am super disappointed that we didn’t get to read it together and talk about the struggles of friendship as an adult. MWF Seeking BFF: My Year Long Search for a New Best Friend by Rachel Bertsche was a fascinating book, in which I saw a lot of my current situation reflected, which earns it a very strong:

Bossypants by Tina Fey

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Bossypants by Tina Fey

While I am a big fan of literary novels and an occasional reader of non-fiction (more in the last few years than prior to my Peace Corps service), I had a real soft-spot for this new genre of comedy/memoir book that seems to have sprung up in the last few years. (Now that I think about it, maybe it has been there all along and I am just rediscovering it. I remember pulling dusty Erma Bombeck books off the shelf in our family room at home and devouring those during naptimes, when I didn’t have to sleep, but I did have to entertain myself quietly so my parents could have a few minutes of sanity each afternoon, all summer long.)

There are many things to like about these comedy/memoirs. The chapters are usually rather short, which are perfect for reading in a bubble bath or the taxi on the way to work. (Who ever thought a bubble bath and a taxi in Chengdu would have anything in common?)  Also, the chapters, while all tied together, stand alone, making it okay if the books sits on my nightstand for a week or two, unread, because I somehow picked up another book and haven’t made it back to the first.  Often times there are pictures or charts or comics to break up the various sections of the book, which let’s face it, even as adults, we like to see.

I was excited when I heard Tina Fey had a new book, Bossypants, coming out soon. I guess not excited enough though, since it took me over a year to actually get my hands on a copy and read it. In retrospect, I have to say that that is okay.

Tina Fey is awesome. I loved her in “Weekend Updates” on Saturday Night Live and her Sarah Palin was spot on during the 2008 presidential campaign. But, the book wasn’t everything I ever hoped it would be.

It was funny, at times. It was entertaining, at times. But, for comedy, it seemed to take itself a little too seriously, at times. There were points where I felt like I was getting a lecture about being a proper feminist, about how females can be funny, can have jobs and families, their cake and they can even eat it too.

I’m living the life I want to live. I don’t need Ms. Fey to give me a self-esteem boost. I just need a laugh after a long day of gray skies.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not totally panning the book. There were great parts to it and it did make me laugh. I loved hearing the backstories of the path that lead her to producing an award winning television series and some behind-the-scenes peeks at SNL. I especially got a kick out of the chapter about when her mom gave her the “special” booklet about becoming a woman, which had three best friends chatting with each other about their changing bodies. I clearly remember getting a similar pamphlet in the sixth grade, after sitting through a truly horrifying presentation by the school nurse, in which three flowers are going through “the change” and discussing what is happening to them. (On a total tangent, but are the flowers as main characters a snarky nod to “the birds and the bees?”)

Maybe I went into this book with a misconception about what it was. It isn’t really a memoir in the sense I expected, but rather a comedic look at the winding road required for women to be successful in a male-dominated field, like comedy. I would offer the book to a friend, for sure, but I would also warn them that it isn’t just a laugh-along look at the life and times of Ms. Tina Fey. It attempts more depth than that and definitely achieves a sharper edge. Overall, Bossypants was a great break from the longer novels and more intense non-fiction books that have been on the top of my reading pile lately. Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants earns a solid:

 

Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

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Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed

Think of Sporty Spice. Now, think of something that is her exact opposite, maybe Klutzy Spice. That is me. I have no athletic ability at all. I may actually suck athletic ability away people standing near me. I’m like a sportiness black hole. And yet, I found Cheryl Strayed’s new book Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail captivating and entrancing.

Strayed, as a young lady in her early 20’s, fell into an emotional abyss when her mother (a non-smoker) was diagnosed with lung cancer and given less than a year to live. That year-long prognosis was soon destroyed, when the disease took its toll faster than anyone could have imagined, killing her mom in a mere forty-nine days. Without their mother to hold the family together, she and her sibling and their step-father fell out of touch, and Strayed fell off the edge of a psychological canyon. Giving in to her every whim, she cheated on her husband, began a not-so-casual relationship with heroin and spent four years wandering without a purpose.

When a book about the Pacific Crest Trail nearly fell into her lap, she decided that a solo hike of one hundred days, from California to the border of Oregon and Washington, was what she needed to get her life back in order. After just a few short months of planning and preparation, she embarked upon a journey that would shatter her physically, but one in which she would reclaim her emotional stability.

As a non-athlete, non-hiker, I was worried that I would find little to relate to when I first picked up this book. (By picked up, I, of course, mean downloaded.) My lack of outdoorsy-ness took little away from the story. I may not know how to pitch a tent or build a fire, but I definitely understand how losing a treasured family member could make one unravel.  I love that Strayed was hiking on the west coast, through parks and towns that I’ve driven through on various occasions. Picturing the west coast and its mountains brought a little bit of home here to me on the east coast.

Strayed is witty and amusing as she tells of her triumphs and failures along the trail. Whether it is a discussion of how her hiking boot went tumbling off the side of a mountain or waking up covered in tiny frogs, I couldn’t help but laugh a little and continue to root for her in this gargantuan undertaking. The instant connections she had with her fellow hikers, each walking the trail for their own varied reasons, was enduring. I can imagine it would be pretty natural for one to feel a quick companionship with others who embarked on a similar colossal journey. These made-from-the-trail relationships go a long way in helping Strayed pull herself back together, piecing back not who she was before her mother’s death, but who she will be and can be as she goes forward after her time on the trail ends.

I may never attempt to walk the physical journey that Strayed did and heaven forbid I ever have to endure the emotional one she traversed, but this memoir made both overwhelming situations seem within the realm of possibility and both seem overcome-able. Cheryl Strayed’s newest publication Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail is both entertaining and heart-wrenching, and is definitely a must-read for this year. This book earns: