Let's Pretend This Never Happened (Lawson) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Lawson relishes revealing plenty about her life, except perhaps just how much she may exaggerate about it. Fall into her writing, though, and she proves that a memoir need not be exact to be enjoyable. She removes the onus of perfectly reported recollections and leads her readers down the rabbit hole of her memories.... The result: a satisfying, blithe tale of a curious adulthood and curiouser childhood. The book skims through a series of comic essays, akin to [David] Sedaris if he were an anxiety-stricken Texas mother with a fascination with the zombie apocalypse.
Melissa Bell - Washington Post


Jenny Lawson is hilarious, snarky, witty, totally inappropriate, and ‘Like Mother Teresa, Only Better.’
Marie Claire


In punchy chapters that cover a fairly uneventful life in the southern Republican regions, blogger Lawson achieves an exaggerated sarcasm that occasionally attains a belly laugh from the reader (“I grew up a poor black girl in New York. Except replace ’black’ with ’white’ and ’New York’ with ’rural Texas’”), but mostly descends into rants about bodily functions and dead animals spiced with profanity. The daughter of a taxidermist whose avid foraging and hunting filled their “violently rural” Wall, Tex., house with motley creatures like racoons and turkeys and later triggered some anxiety disorder, Lawson did not transcend her childhood horrors so much as return to them, marrying at age 22 a fellow student at a local San Angelo college, Victor, and settling down in the town with a job in “HR” while Victor worked “in computers.” In random anecdotal segments Lawson treats the vicissitudes of her 15-year marriage, the birth of daughter Hailey after many miscarriages, some funny insider secrets from the HR office, and an attempt to learn to trust women by spending a weekend in California wine country with a group of bloggers. With little substantive writing on these subjects, however, Lawson’s puerile sniggering and potty mouth gets old fast.
Publishers Weekly


She's famed on the Internet as the Bloggess ("like Mother Teresa, only better") and also writes an (I hope) tongue-in-check parenting column and a self-styled satirical sex column that must be sizzly because my office computer denies me access. Here, Lawson revisits her rural Texas childhood. With lots of media attention expected and comparisons to Chelsea Handler, this book is one to watch.
Library Journal


In this mordant memoir, Lawson, who calls herself “The Bloggess,” displays the wit that’s made her a hit on the Web.... Lawson, whose award-winning website, TheBloggess.com, averages more than half-a-million page-views per month, ... is funny, but her over-the-top tales eventually take their toll, prompting jaded readers to wonder how much of this stuff she’s making up.
Booklist


A mostly funny, irreverent memoir on the foibles of growing up weird. In blogger Lawson's debut book, "The Bloggess" (thebloggess.com) relies entirely on her life stories to drive an unconventional narrative. While marketed as nonfiction, it's a genre distinction the author employs loosely (a point made clear in the book's subtitle).... While Lawson fails to strike the perfect balance between pathos and punch line, she creates a comic character that readers will engage with in shocked dismay as they gratefully turn the pages.
Kirkus Reviews