Mom & Me & Mom by Maya Angelou

I am going to start this post by saying that I don't often read biographies. Why? I don't know. Maybe I prefer to escape reality instead of confronting it? Regardless of my motives, I have been wanting to join Emma Watson's Our Shared Shelf Book Club and this is the November/December 2016 pick. So, I snagged it at the library!

I am a bad reader sometimes...I had never read anything Maya Angelou had written before. I know, I know. Bad librarian! This book has certainly changed that for me, however. I'm very much looking forward to adding more Angelou to my book repertoire. This book was published just before Angelou's 85th birthday and is the last book she ever wrote. Mom & Me & Mom is 200 pages packed with a story strong on emotion and I was able to blaze through it in an afternoon.

Mom & Me & Mom is a biography of Maya Angelou's relationship with her larger-than-life mother, Vivian Baxter, who ran gambling houses across the country. From the ages of 3 to 13, Maya and her brother, Bailey, lived with their grandmother, who seemed well-suited to care for the siblings due to their parents' shortcomings. When she was thirteen, she and her brother were brought back to their mother and stepfather, but it was not without it's problems. They saw their mother as a beautiful lady, not a mother, and that certainly tainted their relationship at the start. As Maya got older, she learned to embrace her mother's strength and feminism. And, essentially, this book addresses the myriad ways that Maya learned how to be such a strong woman because of her mother.Throughout the book, you can feel Maya's gratitude to her mother for showing her that a young, single, African American woman can be somebody. She taught her not to let a white-centric society define who she was and who she could be. It was such an uplifting message, even during the sad times Maya and her mother experienced (abuse, teen pregnancy, racism).

No matter where Maya went and what she did, her mother was there for her supporting her. Vivian worked hard to show Maya that she was strong and capable, and if things got bad, to simply call on her mom for help. Throughout the book, you can see the evolution from initial estrangement and distance, to the solid foundation that lasted throughout the rest of their lives. It was a beautiful thing to witness and I absolutely look forward to reading her other books.

Furiously Happy (Part Two)

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.

Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things by Jenny Lawson

 

Happiest garbage panda ever.

One-Line Summary: Holy Hell. That was a serious rollercoaster ride through the mind of me…only written by someone else. 

 

I’m not going lie and say the book sounded amazing and I had to read it based on the description because that would be a partial lie. While the description was intriguing, it was the cover that sucked me in. Look at the gloriousness of the raccoon (his name is Rory, by the way). He looks, as the title states, furiously happy. I had to read it. 

If you don’t know who Jenny Lawson is, you aren’t alone. I had no clue that she had even written another book before this one titled Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, which I am now reading and digging. Let me see if I can sum up Ms. Lawson: quirky, hilarious, slightly-to-moderately crazy (she calls herself crazy often) genius, and master of sharing too much embarrassing information about herself. In short, I’m smitten. 

In Furiously Happy, I found myself feeling a range of emotions and nodding my head along wondering why no one talks about the important things, like how airports transform people into assholes, or why we don’t talk about the widespread epidemic of chlamydia in koalas, or what happens to all that skin that microdermabrasion places scrape off women’s faces, or why kangaroos actually have three vaginas. I often found myself wondering why I had never thought of such outlandish things when I’m suffering from my sporadic bouts of insomnia, and believe me, my mind goes to some weird places.  Lawson isn’t afraid to face these topics head-on, and I love her for it.

Lawson is a riot to read. Her chapters are short and sweet, and fly by incredibly quickly. Her prose is snappy and lightning-quick and, if you blink, you are sure to miss the humor and sarcasm. The stories of Lawson’s marriage are probably my favorite. They are packed with love and a little outrage, too, but mostly love. Her stories of therapy are fascinating, a little humorous and sometimes cringe-worthy. This is a book celebrating and explaining her various mental illnesses, after all. As someone who has battled both depression and anxiety, I just want to say that she nails the descriptions of each in a way that “normals” will be able to better understand. She sheds light on the taboo of talking about mental illness and makes people feel less alone in their neuroticisms which, in my small opinion, are the biggest reasons to recommend this book to all my library friends and readers.