Author: Jenny Lawson
Enjoyment Rating: **
Source: Digital Copy
Content Alert: frank conversations about mental health
In Furiously Happy, Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess, writes frankly about her mental health challenges, which include anxiety, depression, and a host of related issues.
Okay, okay, I know I'm going to draw some ire here, so I'm taking a deep breath and forging ahead. I'm not a regular reader of Lawson's blog. I never read her first memoir, Let's Pretend This Never Happened. I have never had some of the mental health problems that Lawson has had. So I'm not her target audience. But this book kept coming up in every "Recommended for You" feed, and I bought it. I was reading Brene Brown's Daring Greatly at the same time, and in that book, Brown talks about vulnerability and about how sharing too much too soon with people whose trust you haven't earned can backfire. And that's exactly what this book was for me. I think that for some people, those with whom Lawson has established a rapport over years, this book would be fabulous, but for me, it felt like too much, too soon. The details of all of her fights with her husband, Victor, the incredibly detailed conversations she had with herself, which are things her regular readers would probably love, just annoyed me. So this book would be fabulous in the right hands, but her willingness to put everything out on the table was too much too soon for this reader.
1 comment:
I absolutely LOVE Jenny Lawson. Her first book is less about her mental health (although she does get into that, too, especially when she suffered a series of miscarriages) and more a memoir of her life. I didn't love every single chapter, but some of the stories left me in hysterics. One in particular, I read out loud to my husband and he was crying he was laughing so hard.
I later emailed her and told her about that, and she emailed me back and thanked me for giving her a lift that day. I will forever be her fan.
Go read her first book and see if you can't fall in love with her, too!
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