Summer Reading List: Memoirs

It's time for the second installment of my summer reading list. This week, as I'm sure you've noticed, the theme is memoirs, but not the boring sad traditional kind. These will have you laughing and crying, but mostly laughing...until you cry.

I Was Told There Would Be Cake by Sloane Crosley

This is basically a collection of essays and funny anecdotes from a twenty-something living in New York. I picked it out for precisely those qualities, and it lived up to my expectations: it held my attention, but could be read in short bursts, and it was exactly the crazy kind of unpredictable stories that you never would have thought anyone else would be able to relate to. It’s a great, funny read for anyone, especially those of us in our early twenties who would like an idea of the chaos to come.

Here's Ally in an East Village coffee shop (#theusual).

Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson (The Bloggess)

Laugh out loud funny. The Bloggess was not a blogger I was familiar with previously, so I didn’t know what to expect, which made for an absolutely hilarious experience. In her book she tells stories of her unique small-town, west Texas upbringing, to which I was surprisingly able to relate (in the craziest ways), and the constant influence it has on her adulthood. I tended to read this in the middle of the night, luckily that was before my roommates moved in because every other page I’d be cackling with laughter, which would have really startled anyone in the same room.

I recently lent this book to my roommate Ally who was reluctant to read it at first because it’s about “the country,” but as I type this she’s laughing out loud in a coffee shop over Jenny’s high school experience. I highly recommend this book to anyone who didn’t grow up in a rural area and wants a true account of just how bizarre it is, and also to anyone who did grow up in a rural area and is missing that connection to childhood.

What memoirs have you enjoyed (serious or silly) recently?

KB