Dor Does Books

Jenny Lawson is better known in the online world as The Bloggess and she makes up for most things on the internet. She got Will Wheaton to send her a photograph of him collating paper (so she'd have something to send PR people when they sent her things which showed a distinct lack of reading her blog, obviously).

She's also honest about difficult things, like depression (you may have seen the #depressionlies hashtag on Twitter: that's her too) and some other health issues. 

Let's Pretend This Never Happened is a not quite a memoir, it's a collection of essays - some already published on her blog, like the one about Beyonce the giant metal chicken - but many new. It's a bit shonky in places, the introduction is especially terrible, and there are too many back and forth with the editor "jokes" which aren't funny; plus at least one entry could have been left out.

But.

When it's good it's BRILLIANT. Properly don't-drink-anything-while-reading-this funny. 

It helps that Lawson has the kind of material you only get from growing up in rural Texas with a Taxidermist for a father, but she also has - mostly - a deft comic touch which could wring humour out of the most unlikely scenario. And, like so many great comics, she writes from a position of knowing the flipside. When she touches on the raw topics it is with emotional honesty and lack of flippancy.

I enjoyed it a lot, but the final third dragged a bit for me with none of the belly laughs of the first. Check out her blog before you think of buying this because she is sweary and humour is so very subjective. 3.5 stars.