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| Meet the Family, Dan, Nicole, Lady Katherine and Lord Destructor the Untamable (aka Gizmo) |
I realize if you've been following our blog you've already read a review of Furiously Happy and have probably already added it to your reading list because Meg spoke so highly of it. However, if you somehow missed putting it on hold at your local library or purchasing it I would recommend doing so now. Don't worry. I'll wait.
Good. Now that you've got a copy heading toward you in some manner I'll just tell you what makes this book so amazing. Jenny Lawson has mental illness and blogs about her life. In reading this she has helped me to laugh at a lot of the things I find myself struggling with some days, and to maybe feel a little less crazy. Perhaps one thing it does do is help me appreciate my husband a little more, who has no problem that Gizmo has not one, but two theme songs (Lady Katherine is harder to get a good rhythm and rhyming for, but I'm working on it, it's a work in progress).
While I don't own a koala costume to cuddle koalas in Australia, I honestly don't see any problem with the desire to look like a koala and cuddle a koala at the same time. Similarly I don't have any taxidermized animals to talk to or have sneak over Dan's shoulder as he's on a video call with someone, but again, I wouldn't be surprised if I would do such things.
Near the end of the book Lawson is getting ready to go out and her husband tells her she looks okay, not good, but okay. So she decides she must change her clothes because Victor, her husband, was not paying her a compliment by saying she looked okay. He responds by saying he likes her skin because it keeps her organs from falling on the carpet. I cannot tell you how hard I laughed at this line and how quickly I snapped a picture of the page to send to Dan. He once told me that he liked my green shirt because green is like grass and my hair is brown like dirt so I look like earth, I wouldn't be surprised if this had come from his mouth.
As Meg pointed out in her review months ago, Lawson is wonderful to read and captures the essence of living with anxiety for the "normals" out there.
