Phoebe's Picks: Summer 2008 (Memoirs!)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Geniusby Dave Eggers
And that it is. It is also absolutely my favorite book in the entire world. Not just because it is beautifully written, touching, hilarious and completely charming memoir. But because even the Contents, Preface and Acknowledgements sections are absurdly funny. Rather than even bother writing some sort of review, I am simply going to share with you a snippet from the page with all the boring copyright and Library of Congress info: "Random House is owned in toto by an absolutely huge German company called Bertelsmann A.G. which owns too many things to count or track. That said, no matter how big such companies are, and how many things they own, or how much money they have or make or control, their influence over the daily lives and hearts of individuals, and thus, like 99 percent of what is done by official people in cities like Washington, or Moscow, or Sao Paulo or Auckland, their effect on the short, fraught lives of human beings who limp around and sleep and dream of flying through bloodstreams, who love the smell of rubber cement and think of space travel while having intercourse, is very very small, and so hardly woth worrying about." And if THAT doesn't make you want to read this book, well, then... you don't want to read this book.
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Luckyby Alice Sebold
What can I say about a memoir about a brutal, horrific rape and the victim's painful journey toward reclaiming herself? To be perfectly honest, reading this book threw me into a month-long funk. And yet, when I sat down to try to pick out my 5 favorite memoirs, this one absolutely had to be in there. Sebold's openness in discussing her trauma and everything associated with it - from the hospital to the police station to the courtroom to the eventual steps toward healing - is moving. Discussing a rape with most people changes things. Changes the way they see you. And them here comes this brave, intelligent, witty, strong woman and she just, like, lays it all out there. And I could not help but be affected.
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Magical Thinkingby Augusten Burroughs
I bought this book at an airport in South Carolina. I had read the entire thing by the time I got back to Cleveland (via a somewhat asinine layover in Detroit, but still). It was one of those books where I kept getting embarrassed because I was laughing out loud on the plane. Over and over and over again. The way Burroughs puts together a story – my god! He can keep you riveted waiting to find out what happens to the “rat/thing” (which turned out to be a tiny mouse) that he attempts to kill in various strange and demented ways when he finds it in his Manhattan bathtub – all the while laughing hysterically at the incredible images he is painting of this absurd scene. Out of all of this author’s memoirs, while I absolutely think Dry is the best, Magical Thinking is by far the funniest.
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Candy Girlby Diablo Cody
I LOVED the movie Juno, so when I heard that the woman who had written the screenplay had also published her own memoir, I had to have it. And then when I discovered her memoir was about her time spent as a stripper (in Minneapolis, of all places), I had to have it IMMEDIATELY! It follows her through her year-long stripping career – from her first amateur night, to her nights doing “bed dances” at a naked megaplex affectionately known as “Big Pink”. Cody weaves her words as cleverly as she does in Juno. And if I hadn’t wanted the book before I even had it, I’d have been sold the minute I saw her Number 1 pick in her list of The Ten Worst Songs to Strip To: “That Midnight Oil song about aborigines.” Amen, lady!
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