I am ashamed to admit that I discovered this book only because Amazon.com suggested it to me and offered it to me for $1.99 on the Kindle. Had I known, I would have paid ten times that. Let's just say that Amazon.com has me pegged, and I am going to have to go to Jenny Lawson's blog (www.thebloggess.com) and buy a t-shirt or something to make up for getting the book practically for free. I think I owe her that much. I can't remember the last time a book reminded me as much of myself and made me laugh so hard I cried.
I am confident that if I had been raised in rural Texas instead of rural New Hampshire and my father had been a taxidermist instead of a new age/hippie/Native American woodsman, this is exactly how I would have turned out. As you can see from the cover of the book, Lawson has not exactly escaped her father's taxidermy fetish. This little guy, in case it is not entirely clear from the photo, is the mouse version of Hamlet, with a tiny skull in his right hand, intoning, "alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well, Horatio." I'm not really big on taxidermy, but even I have to admit that this is pretty fucking cool. I would probably display this with pride. Lawson admits that "having one dead animal in the house is eclectic and artistic. More than one reeks of serial killer. There really is a fine line there." (289) It's unclear how many dead animals Lawson now has in her house, but I know there's a boar's head and a baby alligator pirate and I think that last one alone just about pushes her over the line to serial killer. This is really to put the end at the beginning though, as Lawson returns to her roots in rural Texas and starts collecting dead animals.
As a child and adolescent, she is not quite so sanguine about her rural Texas upbringing. She writes, "My mom was a big proponent of the 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger' theory, almost to the point where she seemed to be daring the world to kill us." (13) Don't I know it. The New Hampshire equivalent of this sentiment, where winters reach -40 F and summers reach 105 F--and frequently espoused by my parents--is "there's no such thing as bad weather--only bad clothing." When I was growing up the thermostat stayed at 67 no matter how cold it was outside. "Please, sir, may I have some more (heat, that is)?" I'd beg my dad. "No," he'd say, "go put on another sweater." See, he was aware that I was probably already wearing several sweaters, which is, inside the house, going above and beyond the call of duty, IMHO, but his solution was to just pile them on. I'd do him one better and put on a coat and hat and walk around in front of him, and he'd say, "very funny. The thermostat stays where it is." If this sounds like a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon that's because I think there was a strip where Calvin and his mom have a similar exchange. I'm with Calvin here. I think that if Jesus intended the heat to stay at 67, he wouldn't have invented thermostats that go up to 90 (or higher) and I like being able to lounge around the house in pajamas and bare feet even in the depths of winter, especially if someone else is paying for my heat (don't tell my management company) so my thermostat is set at something like 75.
Lawson captures the excruciating agony of growing up weird in an environment that is pretty fucking weird itself. (Personally, I describe my childhood as taking place in Twin Peaks, which more or less expresses the same sentiment.) Lawson writes:
When I was little my mother used to say that I had "a nervous stomach." That was what we called "severe untreated anxiety disorder" back in the seventies, when everything was cured with Flintstone vitamins and threats to send me to live with my grandmother if I didn't stop hiding from people in my toy box.
By age seven I realized that there was something wrong with me, and that most children didn't hyperventilate and throw up when asked to leave the house. My mother called me "quirky." My teachers whispered "neurotic." But deep down I knew there was a better word for what I was. Doomed. (37)
I was spared this doomed feeling for a little while longer than Lawson thanks to a magical hippie private school, but after my first week of public school at nine, I too was suffering from a severe untreated anxiety disorder that my parents tried to treat with, essentially, Flintstone vitamins and a lot of threats to stop hiding in the closet and get my butt into the car so they could take me to school, which was generally accomplished by my father physically dragging me into my classroom. What was missing from Lawson's experience, and my own, was any analysis of why a small child would have such a "nervous stomach," which, as a euphemism does not begin to address the horrors of childhood mental illness.
Lawson's school experience was pretty terrible--there is a chapter about the artificial insemination of a cow with a turkey baster that I'm not even going to attempt to describe because there is no way I can do it justice so you'll just have to read it for yourself--and she quickly turned into the "weird girl"--the one who wrote book reports on Stephen King novels in elementary school and dressed as a goth starting in middle school. Her status as "weird girl" was greatly exacerbated by experiences such as being followed to school, and into school, by her father's flock of aggressive wild turkeys ("large quail," he called them) who caused havoc and shit all over the building, such that when her class was transitioning to gym or something or other, they all ran into Lawson's father cleaning up mounds of turkey shit. Even in Texas, I think that marks you as weird.
Like most weird girls, Lawson gravitated to the dark and disturbing, with some experimentation with illicit substances along the way (again, better read in the original). Even as an adult, she still seems to have an OCD about the (apparently imminent) zombie apocalypse. One of her ongoing "life" arguments with her rather more traditional husband is whether Jesus, if he was indeed reborn, would have been a zombie. (She says yes, obviously; he says there's a difference, but I think she makes a strong case.) This is not her only OCD. When she is pregnant for the third time (after two miscarriages), she becomes convinced that her cats have the power to grant her good luck.
Once, as Victor drove me to work in the morning, I realized that I'd forgotten to ask the cats to wish us luck and I demanded that he turn around immediately. He tried to logically explain that the cats didn't actually have the ability to give me good or bad luck, but it didn't matter. I knew that the cats weren't in charge of good luck. These were the same cats who would stand inside the litter box and cluelessly poop over the side. Of course they weren't controlling my destiny. I was controlling my destiny. I was just doing it by following all the little OCD routines that I'd picked up that had made life keep going. (130)
Personally, I think that if one is going to endow any creature with magical powers, cats are a great choice, because they already possess magical powers. I would, and do, totally ask my cats for good luck, fashion advice, pretty much anything, their litter box exploits notwithstanding. And I do not leave the house without saying goodbye to them. Ever. So personally I think that her calling this one an OCD routine actually detracts from its inherent underlying rationality and that her husband should know that.
I was drawn to Lawson because she not only suffers from some mental health issues but several physical ailments as well. She describes herself as having generalized anxiety disorder, which:
[f]or me . . . is basically like having all of the other anxiety disorders smooshed into one. Even the ones that aren't recognized by modern science. Things like birds-will-probably-smother-me-in-my-sleep anxiety disorder and I-keep-crackers-in-my-pocket-in-case-I-get-trapped-in-an-elevator anxiety disorder. Basically I'm just generally anxious about fucking everything. In fact, I suspect that how they came up with the name. (147)
Lawson is acutely aware of the effect her disorder has on those around her, and I suspect she could rattle off the dates of all the dinner parties she has inadvertently ruined by panicking and bringing up inappropriate conversational topics. I expect that she remembers the look of horror on her husband's face as she dug herself in deeper and deeper at each of these parties. She claims that her "filter" operates on a seven-second delay, and by the time she realizes that she's saying something inappropriate, she's already said it. I really empathize with this problem--as I am continually reminded, I either (a) don't have a filter, or (b) have a filter that only kicks in, along with great remorse, about an hour too late. Ah, well. The problem is, of course, that when you're the bull in the china shop, you know it, and that makes you even more anxious and your behavior correspondingly worse. Lawson explains:
In short? It is exhausting being me. Pretending to be normal is draining and requires amazing amounts of energy and Xanax. In fact, I should probably charge money to all the normal people to simply not go to your social functions and ruin them. Especially since I end up spending so much money on sedatives to keep my anxiety at least slightly in check, and those expenses are not even tax-deductible. Still it's worth the personal expense, because being drugged enough to appear semi-coherent is preferable to being treated like an unwelcome polar bear at a dinner party. (150)
I think that "unwelcome polar bear at a dinner party" should officially supplant the "bull in the china shop" metaphor I used earlier because it's just so much more descriptive of the anxiety one feels in such situations. The damn bull never seemed to have any self-awareness regarding his problem.
Unfortunately for Lawson, she also suffers from rheumatoid arthritis, the treatments for which are almost worse than the disease itself. She points out the irony of taking drugs for one chronic condition that themselves put one at risk for other chronic conditions, like cancer. I think this might be one of those "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger" things.
Ultimately, Lawson drags her family back to rural Texas so her daughter can experience the kind of freewheeling rural life that she herself did, having realized that it is the quirks that make her who she is. I'm sure that's true. But Lawson acts as if there's no option other than (a) rural Texas or, (b) suburban Texas. I beg to differ. Why not move to a city, somewhere like Austin where one's quirks will be appreciated for their diversity? I'm strongly of the opinion that quirky people belong in urban environments where everyone is a little bit tweaked, and I'd sooner gouge out my eyes with a spoon than move back to the emotionally crippling environment where I grew up or subject my family to it. But that's just me. Lawson seems pretty happy, except for the possibility that her house is located on an Indian burial ground and when the zombie apocalypse comes, well, you know. . .
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