I didn't know a whole lot about Jen Kirkman before reading her book. I knew she's a comedian, her tweets are funny, and she's wrote another book before this one about how she can barely take care of herself, how could she have a child? (I'm just inferring from the title. It's literally called I Can Barely Take Care of Myself: Tales From a Happy Life Without Kids.) Anyway. That's enough for me to at least want to read her book, because she seems funny and the premise of her memoir really caught my eye. It sounded like the kind of book that I could pick up when I was feeling down about myself for whatever reason and lose myself in her stories about anything and everything, and somehow it will make me feel better (the last memoir to do this to me was Drew Barrymore's Wildflower.) So, I marked it as "want to read" on Goodreads, thinking that it might not be a book I'd ever get to, but certainly wanted to. Then, one hot day in July, I found myself at the bookstore with a prioritized list of books that I was going to buy. I only ended up finding one of those books in stock, and while looking for that book, I came across I Know What I'm Doing—And Other Lies I Tell Myself and said to myself, "OMG! I have to buy this because it's here now and I'm here now and it sounds amazing."
A couple months passed before I picked it up for real and started reading it, and I'm so glad I did. Kirkman tackles, through her own stories, the ridiculousness that society forces upon us sometimes. She got married and it didn't work out, like countless marriages, so she got divorced. Her eye-opening accounts of how, in this decade, divorced women are treated by other women who are even close to them, is important. At one point, she even had to switch doctors because her former doctor was treating her like a hippie and judging her, all because she'd had 2 partners since getting divorced! It was just one of those books that talks about things that are there; they've always been there, but only when reading a book about them do you truly realize how much they're there. Society forces some stupid shit on us for no apparent reason other than it's what other people have deemed respectable, especially for women, and it's great to read about someone who basically gives the finger to that stuff. Among my favorites in Kirkman's book were the first time she traveled alone since divorcing, and how people were "worried" for her to be traveling alone without a man (yet this convention doesn't seem to exist for the opposite sex), and her hilarious account of staying in on New Year's Eve in 2013 because she was sick of being forced to go out and have fun just because it's New Year's Eve. But, above all, my favorite part of the book was chapter 10, titled, "I'm Okay, You're Okay", in which Kirkman lists out things that it's okay to do despite the fact that other people make you think it's wrong. For example, "It's okay to not want monogamy for some periods of your life", or "It's okay to drop your old friends from grade school", or "It's okay to talk honestly about sex". The chapter also contains my favorite quote from the entire book, which is:
"You want the life someone else has? That's because you can only see their outside and you're comparing it with your inside."
To repeat, I highly recommend I Know What I'm Doing—And Other Lies I Tell Myself to anyone living on Planet Earth. It's for sure one of the best memoirs I've ever read and also one of if not the best feminist book I've ever read. 5/5 stars.
I've also read some other books that I am choosing not to review in full, because I really didn't like them all that much. I read My Grandmother Sends Her Regards and Apologises by Fredrik Backman, which I totally expected to love, but I totally really did not. It tells the story of 7-year-old Elsa grappling with a world that no longer contains her Granny, and it really sounded like one of those diamond in the rough books that is underrated, but it's not, at least for me. It was a little too out there for my tastes, and the ending was entirely lame and underwhelming. 2 out of 5 stars from me. I also picked up Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, a celebrated classic, which I also did not enjoy. There are definitely some classic books that transcend the amount of time since they were published, but Frankenstein is not one of them. It was written in 1816 and you can definitely tell that it was, and the story itself doesn't seem all that special all these years later. I appreciate Frankenstein for its contribution to popular culture, but I am not a fan of the novel itself. Nopety nope nope. Another 2 out of 5 stars.
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