Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, by Jenny Lawson

I laughed ’til I cried when I read this book. I really did. I had to read it with a roll of toilet paper at hand. I read it on the train and tried to stop laughing because the other people were looking at me like I belonged in a hospital ward. I am afraid I shrieked with laughter in a most uncivilized way and ended up having to restrict myself to small doses of a couple of pages at a time. Despite it being – as the subtitle of her next memoir goes – a funny book about kinda horrible things like psychological problems. There are authors like Augusten Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, whose lives are/were one long mental aberration, and then there are the enfants terribles, like Jenny Diski, who spent time in an institution, and then there are the depressives, like Sylvia Plath, Charles Dickens and Franz Kafka. (Continue reading…)