Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I like the bloggess. Jenny Lawson is witty, warm, and delightful, and can be clever as well. Not that you'd be able to tell by this book. Let's Pretend This Never Happened is a rambling collection of anecdotes from Mrs. Lawson's "crazy" upbringing, and some of the stories are amusing, and pitiful, but lordy, she steps all over her punchlines with her absolute, undying need to point out just how wacky it all really was. Just tell me the story and let me decide, okay? If I think it's funny, I'll laugh. You don't have to cue me. It's like how Jay Leno has to ruin EVERY joke he tells by explaining the punch line in detail. We get it. You're now making it less funny. I retract my laugh. Thank you. I respect Mrs. Lawson too much to suggest that her editor required her to pad the book for a greater word count, but it does tend to feel that way. Stories that might have been funny (might, not a given) if left to their own devices are weighed down by the author's assertions that Yes! My childhood was just THAT effed up, ya'll! I really wanted her to stop doing that. Over and over. And on that point, exactly how many times can you read the F word before it loses its power of emphasis? It is not used sparingly. I am a cusser, so I was not offended in the least, but it did get distracting. I started to wonder at her unvaried vocabulary a little bit. The stories themselves are hit or miss. It was difficult for me to tell if I wasn't laughing because it wasn't a funny story or if the stories were just interrupted too much and overly interpreted for me by the author. I also had an unconventional upbringing, and it's possible my opinion is skewed on that account, but I felt that many of these "crazy" scenarios just weren't that weird. She just kept telling me that they were. It's like when someone tells you a story and they say, "I haven't even told you the crazy part yet," and you're like, right, I know, because nothing remotely strange has happened within your story, but they just keep talking and it never gets interesting. It never does. I didn't hate this book -- I doubt I could hate anything by the bloggess -- but I felt that the editors did it a disservice by not assisting more in the streamlining process. This is the author's first book, and while she is responsible for the content and, well, all of it, what is an editor for if not to help make the book readable? There was just too much that didn't fit here. I will continue to read her blog and will read her next book, whenever that might be, but I'll be reading it with an eye toward looking for improvements over this one. For the record, I borrowed it from the library. I highly recommend the library if you're considering this title.