Book-It '21! Book #33: "Broken (in the Best Possible Way)" by Jenny Lawson
The all new 50 Books Challenge!
Title: Broken (in the Best Possible Way) by Jenny Lawson
Details: Copyright 2021, Macmillian Publishing Group
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "As Jenny Lawson knows, falling apart can bring us together.
"It's weird because we often try to present our fake, shiny, happy selves to others and make sure we're not wearing too obvious pajamas at the grocery store, but really, who wants to see that level of fraud? No one. What we really want is to know we're not alone in our terribleness. We want to appreciate the failure that makes us perfectly us and wonderfully relatable to every other person out there who is also pretending that they have their shit together and didn't just eat that onion ring that fell on the floor. Human foibles are what makes us us, and the art of mortification is what brings us all together."
---Introduction, Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson has always been quite candid about her mental health. In Broken (in the best possible way), she explores how after years of suffering from depression she finally tried the experimental transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Lawson details her treatment with brutal honesty-- and with her trademark brutal humor.
Lawson discusses the frustration of dealing with her insurance company in “An Open Letter to My Insurance Company,” which should be an anthem for anyone who has ever had to fight to get a claim covered. She tackles such timelessly debated questions as “How do dogs know they have penises?” We see how her vacuum cleaner almost set her house on fire, how she was attacked by three bears, business ideas she can never pitch to Shark Tank, and why she can never go back to the post office. Of course, Jenny’s long-suffering husband Victor- the Ricky to Jenny’s Lucille Ball- is present throughout.
If laughter is the best medicine, then Broken (in the best possible way) should be required reading. It is a beacon of hope and a wellspring of laughter."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've spoken before about my affinity for Jenny Lawson's work and when I heard she had a new book of essays coming out, I had to read it!
How I Liked It: Earlier this month, I asked when a trope isn't a trope. (The answer is when the author does the work to avoid the trope.) In this book, I was struck by the question of when you recognize an author's formula and patterns, can it lessen the book for you? I'll get to what I mean in a bit.
Firstly, if you're not familiar with Lawson, she's a long-form blogger (from back when that was more of a Thing) whose genuinely funny stories about her rural Texas upbringing (with eccentric father), and her struggles with her mental health and generally eccentric world view paved the way for three bestselling books: two books of essays and an adult coloring book. While her first book dealt more with the past (her childhood, upbringing, meeting and eventual marriage of her husband, the birth of her child) it contained several stories in the present. Her second book contained mostly stories in the present. This, her third book of essays, contains stories almost entirely in the present.
Lawson veers from both funny essays to serious stories about family, marriage, mental health, life and perspective, and given that this is her fourth book and the first three were bestsellers, also a bit of what it's like to be a writer and the fact she writes a lot about people in her life and they become characters (particularly her husband Victor). The stories are relatively stand alone and jump around in time.
I haven't read Lawson in a couple years, usually being a few years late to her books of essays (I read her 2012 debut in 2015 and her 2015 follow-up in 2019) and was honestly afraid when I started reading that I'd now find her shtick stale. The book starts off hard and condensed in and of Lawson's signature style: humorous misunderstandings, capslock, and purposely nonsensical side tangents. I was getting a bit nervous, especially when Lawson's somewhat obvious formula became clearer and clearer, but then I laughed. Genuinely. And kept laughing.
Fortunately, Lawson isn't just serving up her standard, which would be fine (we'll get to that). This book is more experimental and braver than the previous two in breaching format and going in different directions. Lawson doesn't just do funny essays, she gets the most overtly political here I remember her ever getting in directing one hundred percent deserved venom at the American healthcare system, in an essay she calls "An Open Letter to My Insurance Company":
CONTENT WARNING! THIS CONTAINS MENTION OF SUICIDE, PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY
One of the hardest things to do when you have depression is to admit that you need help and seek treatment. We are exhausted and hate ourselves and don't want to spend time and money on ourselves, but we push through. We do the hard work. Then we are told that the only doctor you will pay for can't see us for two months... or the doctor who gives hope with a plan of action is overruled by you, someone who has never met me, who has never seen my pain, who will not mourn the person who will be lost to this. You tell me that I'm not worth the treatment that is already so hard to find. You say it so many of us. And sadly, some believe it. Many of them can't speak about it now because they no longer have the voice to. So I will speak for them.(pg 76)
You say you have my best interests at heart. You are not even a good liar. I'm embarrassed for us both.
I wonder what would happen if I tried the same reasoning on you. "I've received your insurance premium invoice but my conclusion is that this fee is not financially appropriate for you. It is my decision that you should be paid in bags of rocks deposited directly on your testicles. You may appeal this decision by screaming and hitting your head against a brick wall until you get tired. Then read this letter again because I'm not fucking listening." Maybe I'll try that. I don't know.
What I do know is that you are not helping. You are a hindrance-- a barrier to treatment-- and worse, you are part of the problem. If I were to kill myself today I would first blame my broken brain. And second, I would blame you. You are killing me. You are shaming me. You are standing in the way of the health and happiness of so many of us and you are making money while standing on our backs and telling us how much we don't need the things that keep us alive.
But I am still alive. In spite of you. And I will use this breath to keep living and remind myself that I am worthy of happiness and health and life and that you are a terrible liar. And I will stoke the anger you breed in me and use it to speak out to others so that they know you cannot be trusted. Because someone has to look out for the sick people in the world.
And you certainly aren't doing it.(pgs 77 and 78)
The entire chapter and essay should be a call to arms (figuratively, thank you!) and it's worth reminding that Lawson is a lifelong Texan that presently lives there (so thus her commentary is for Texas in particular, although it sadly works for plenty of other states as well). The politically savvy could and should snap up pieces of her essay (with credit and permission) and use them everywhere. Her rightful anger isn't limited to that chapter, either. When undergoing experimental therapy for depression and anxiety, she makes a "slightly ranty side note" about her efforts to get the procedure covered by her health insurance:
And I'm lucky. I have support and insurance and a voice and money to buy the medication and treatment that isn't provided to me. What about those who don't have those things? We fail them. We fail ourselves. They are our children and our coworkers and our parents and the homeless person on the street and the boy who will marry your child and the girl who will save your life. They are the insurance clerks I speak with who tell me that they deal with the same problems. They are us.
If you've dealt with this bullshit and you're still around, I salute you. It is hard and embarrassing and makes me furious. You deserve better. We all do.(pg 89)
Aside from the political and the funny, Lawson has some downright heartbreaking pieces from everything to mortality to family trauma to recovery and more.
Something about the serious and the funny, though. You never know if a chapter is going to be wacky animal hijinks and genital jokes or a deathly serious, haunting look into a jarring subject. And while I'm not sure if it's intentional to have that dizzying disconnect, it in no way detracts from Lawson's greater message about the nature of mental illness (and forging into the unknown unsure of whether you're going to be happy or ache is an excellent metaphor for mental illness).
But back to Lawson's bread and butter, the funny. Can you recognize a formula and still enjoy it, especially if it's comedy, particularly the type of comedy that works on the unexpected?
Apparently with Lawson, you can. I honestly laughed out loud in many, many places in this book. I think part of it is finding a formula that not only works, but that you keep fresh. Given Lawson's ability and willingness to experiment with genres, her work will hopefully stay that way.
Pick this book up for a good laugh, pick it up for a treatise on mental illness, pick it up for life lessons, just pick it up. Sometimes a formula works.
Notable: Something pretty disappointing to see in 2021 that becomes an unfortunate recurring theme throughout the book is Lawson's really clumsy language with gender.
A good deal of Lawson's humor involves the accidentally-socially inappropriate, including genital mentions, as well as just off-the-cuff strange musings:
But then I remembered the thing that makes you a mammal is laying live young instead of eggs and lactating, but I couldn't even lactate properly. But then I remembered that men don't lay live young and they're still mammals, and I thought maybe I needed to consult a science book because I'd fucked up the definition, or that maybe it was another situation where men just get a pass because of that whole "I own a penis" thing, and then my friend was like [...] (pg 4)
People say it's good to be a woman because they can have multiple orgasms, but it seems like anyone can have multiple orgasms if they're patient enough. (pg 34)
Thank you for your quick response! I am still very interested in becoming a vampire but I'm concerned about the name of the association... THE VAMPIRE BROTHERHOOD. I am a lady and therefore do not have the requisite penis necessary to be a "brother." Also I'm a feminist so I worry about the connotations of an exclusively all-male vampire society.(pg 49)
When hairless cats curl up into a ball, their excess belly skin looks a lot like a lady garden, so we can have the best of both worlds by adopted unwanted hairless cats and using them for photo shoots of "vaginas" so that we can make a Pornhub that doesn't exploit actual women. We'll call it "bald pusses" [sic] and technically we can't get sued for lying. (pg 268)
Given that Lawson has expressed her support for both trans people and expresses regular public support for her nonbinary child, you'd think that she'd be better with this. This is another example where voicing your support is great, but really showing it with your actions (in this case changing your language) is even better.
Look, I get that it's (largely) a humor book and sometimes she's even writing as a character.
I realize our language has to be decolonized and that's a slow process. But making language trans and nonbinary inclusive is actually a lot easier than it seems. Even Lawson lampshading her own lack of awareness would fit into the memoir-character for herself she's created (suggestion: "Wait, not that having a penis makes you a man. Or that all men have penises. Hey, what about nonbinary vampires? JUST HOW INCLUSIVE IS THIS VAMPIRE SOCIETY!?! I REFUSE TO BELONG TO AN ARMY OF THE TRANSPHOBIC UNDEAD! They have too many seats in government as it is.")
In a throw-away joke, though, Lawson might have revealed what she really thinks of such corrections:
People say nice guys finish last, but I'm okay with finishing last, because who wants to hang out with the assholes in the front? That sounds miserable. Nice guys finish last but they get to be surrounded with other nice guys, and you know what nice guys bring? Free cheese. Margarita machines. They'll give you a ride home later. They won't even yell at you for being sexist for using "guys" as a universal name for humans because they're nice[.] (pg 39)
Then again, it might seriously be merely a joke.
Either way, I hope Lawson gets educated about this and makes a change. A high percentage of trans people struggle with mental health issues, in no small part because bigotry takes a huge toll on your mental health. You can't advocate for mental health awareness while unwittingly excluding a whole population like that.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
My friend Karen refers to me as "Britney Spears in Mensa" in that I seem like a ditzy weirdo but most of the time I not only am in on the joke but am smart enough to recognize that I AM the joke. (pg 210)
I kind of scratched my head at this one and given the well-deserved public backlash this year to the treatment of Britney Spears both by her parents and the mass media, I'm going to chalk that up as a dated joke that can now peacefully retire.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Of course, Jenny’s long-suffering husband Victor- the Ricky to Jenny’s Lucille Ball- is present throughout. (from the front flap and promotional copy)
Quick question? If Ricky Ricardo is a fictional character (portrayed by Desi Arnaz) and was married in I Love Lucy to fictional character Lucy Ricardo (played by Lucille Ball, to whom Arnaz was married in real life), what exactly does this sentence mean?
I get what was intended, a sort of I Love Lucy dynamic exists in Lawson's recollections with her husband (she says or does something eccentric, he reacts with bewilderment/consternation), but that is so easy to fix. As is, it presents a much weirder dynamic that's actually kind of fascinating, if not at all really representative of what Lawson writes of her marriage. How would Lucille Ball, the real-life actress, have reacted to Ricky Ricardo, the fictional bandleader? I like to think Lawson herself might have left this error in for the oddly entertaining head-scratching it would provoke.
Final Grade: A
DON'T FORGET I'M ON BLOGSPOT NOW!
Title: Broken (in the Best Possible Way) by Jenny Lawson
Details: Copyright 2021, Macmillian Publishing Group
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "As Jenny Lawson knows, falling apart can bring us together.
"It's weird because we often try to present our fake, shiny, happy selves to others and make sure we're not wearing too obvious pajamas at the grocery store, but really, who wants to see that level of fraud? No one. What we really want is to know we're not alone in our terribleness. We want to appreciate the failure that makes us perfectly us and wonderfully relatable to every other person out there who is also pretending that they have their shit together and didn't just eat that onion ring that fell on the floor. Human foibles are what makes us us, and the art of mortification is what brings us all together."
---Introduction, Broken (in the best possible way)
Jenny Lawson has always been quite candid about her mental health. In Broken (in the best possible way), she explores how after years of suffering from depression she finally tried the experimental transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). Lawson details her treatment with brutal honesty-- and with her trademark brutal humor.
Lawson discusses the frustration of dealing with her insurance company in “An Open Letter to My Insurance Company,” which should be an anthem for anyone who has ever had to fight to get a claim covered. She tackles such timelessly debated questions as “How do dogs know they have penises?” We see how her vacuum cleaner almost set her house on fire, how she was attacked by three bears, business ideas she can never pitch to Shark Tank, and why she can never go back to the post office. Of course, Jenny’s long-suffering husband Victor- the Ricky to Jenny’s Lucille Ball- is present throughout.
If laughter is the best medicine, then Broken (in the best possible way) should be required reading. It is a beacon of hope and a wellspring of laughter."
Why I Wanted to Read It: I've spoken before about my affinity for Jenny Lawson's work and when I heard she had a new book of essays coming out, I had to read it!
How I Liked It: Earlier this month, I asked when a trope isn't a trope. (The answer is when the author does the work to avoid the trope.) In this book, I was struck by the question of when you recognize an author's formula and patterns, can it lessen the book for you? I'll get to what I mean in a bit.
Firstly, if you're not familiar with Lawson, she's a long-form blogger (from back when that was more of a Thing) whose genuinely funny stories about her rural Texas upbringing (with eccentric father), and her struggles with her mental health and generally eccentric world view paved the way for three bestselling books: two books of essays and an adult coloring book. While her first book dealt more with the past (her childhood, upbringing, meeting and eventual marriage of her husband, the birth of her child) it contained several stories in the present. Her second book contained mostly stories in the present. This, her third book of essays, contains stories almost entirely in the present.
Lawson veers from both funny essays to serious stories about family, marriage, mental health, life and perspective, and given that this is her fourth book and the first three were bestsellers, also a bit of what it's like to be a writer and the fact she writes a lot about people in her life and they become characters (particularly her husband Victor). The stories are relatively stand alone and jump around in time.
I haven't read Lawson in a couple years, usually being a few years late to her books of essays (I read her 2012 debut in 2015 and her 2015 follow-up in 2019) and was honestly afraid when I started reading that I'd now find her shtick stale. The book starts off hard and condensed in and of Lawson's signature style: humorous misunderstandings, capslock, and purposely nonsensical side tangents. I was getting a bit nervous, especially when Lawson's somewhat obvious formula became clearer and clearer, but then I laughed. Genuinely. And kept laughing.
Fortunately, Lawson isn't just serving up her standard, which would be fine (we'll get to that). This book is more experimental and braver than the previous two in breaching format and going in different directions. Lawson doesn't just do funny essays, she gets the most overtly political here I remember her ever getting in directing one hundred percent deserved venom at the American healthcare system, in an essay she calls "An Open Letter to My Insurance Company":
CONTENT WARNING! THIS CONTAINS MENTION OF SUICIDE, PLEASE PROCEED ACCORDINGLY
One of the hardest things to do when you have depression is to admit that you need help and seek treatment. We are exhausted and hate ourselves and don't want to spend time and money on ourselves, but we push through. We do the hard work. Then we are told that the only doctor you will pay for can't see us for two months... or the doctor who gives hope with a plan of action is overruled by you, someone who has never met me, who has never seen my pain, who will not mourn the person who will be lost to this. You tell me that I'm not worth the treatment that is already so hard to find. You say it so many of us. And sadly, some believe it. Many of them can't speak about it now because they no longer have the voice to. So I will speak for them.(pg 76)
You say you have my best interests at heart. You are not even a good liar. I'm embarrassed for us both.
I wonder what would happen if I tried the same reasoning on you. "I've received your insurance premium invoice but my conclusion is that this fee is not financially appropriate for you. It is my decision that you should be paid in bags of rocks deposited directly on your testicles. You may appeal this decision by screaming and hitting your head against a brick wall until you get tired. Then read this letter again because I'm not fucking listening." Maybe I'll try that. I don't know.
What I do know is that you are not helping. You are a hindrance-- a barrier to treatment-- and worse, you are part of the problem. If I were to kill myself today I would first blame my broken brain. And second, I would blame you. You are killing me. You are shaming me. You are standing in the way of the health and happiness of so many of us and you are making money while standing on our backs and telling us how much we don't need the things that keep us alive.
But I am still alive. In spite of you. And I will use this breath to keep living and remind myself that I am worthy of happiness and health and life and that you are a terrible liar. And I will stoke the anger you breed in me and use it to speak out to others so that they know you cannot be trusted. Because someone has to look out for the sick people in the world.
And you certainly aren't doing it.(pgs 77 and 78)
The entire chapter and essay should be a call to arms (figuratively, thank you!) and it's worth reminding that Lawson is a lifelong Texan that presently lives there (so thus her commentary is for Texas in particular, although it sadly works for plenty of other states as well). The politically savvy could and should snap up pieces of her essay (with credit and permission) and use them everywhere. Her rightful anger isn't limited to that chapter, either. When undergoing experimental therapy for depression and anxiety, she makes a "slightly ranty side note" about her efforts to get the procedure covered by her health insurance:
And I'm lucky. I have support and insurance and a voice and money to buy the medication and treatment that isn't provided to me. What about those who don't have those things? We fail them. We fail ourselves. They are our children and our coworkers and our parents and the homeless person on the street and the boy who will marry your child and the girl who will save your life. They are the insurance clerks I speak with who tell me that they deal with the same problems. They are us.
If you've dealt with this bullshit and you're still around, I salute you. It is hard and embarrassing and makes me furious. You deserve better. We all do.(pg 89)
Aside from the political and the funny, Lawson has some downright heartbreaking pieces from everything to mortality to family trauma to recovery and more.
Something about the serious and the funny, though. You never know if a chapter is going to be wacky animal hijinks and genital jokes or a deathly serious, haunting look into a jarring subject. And while I'm not sure if it's intentional to have that dizzying disconnect, it in no way detracts from Lawson's greater message about the nature of mental illness (and forging into the unknown unsure of whether you're going to be happy or ache is an excellent metaphor for mental illness).
But back to Lawson's bread and butter, the funny. Can you recognize a formula and still enjoy it, especially if it's comedy, particularly the type of comedy that works on the unexpected?
Apparently with Lawson, you can. I honestly laughed out loud in many, many places in this book. I think part of it is finding a formula that not only works, but that you keep fresh. Given Lawson's ability and willingness to experiment with genres, her work will hopefully stay that way.
Pick this book up for a good laugh, pick it up for a treatise on mental illness, pick it up for life lessons, just pick it up. Sometimes a formula works.
Notable: Something pretty disappointing to see in 2021 that becomes an unfortunate recurring theme throughout the book is Lawson's really clumsy language with gender.
A good deal of Lawson's humor involves the accidentally-socially inappropriate, including genital mentions, as well as just off-the-cuff strange musings:
But then I remembered the thing that makes you a mammal is laying live young instead of eggs and lactating, but I couldn't even lactate properly. But then I remembered that men don't lay live young and they're still mammals, and I thought maybe I needed to consult a science book because I'd fucked up the definition, or that maybe it was another situation where men just get a pass because of that whole "I own a penis" thing, and then my friend was like [...] (pg 4)
People say it's good to be a woman because they can have multiple orgasms, but it seems like anyone can have multiple orgasms if they're patient enough. (pg 34)
Thank you for your quick response! I am still very interested in becoming a vampire but I'm concerned about the name of the association... THE VAMPIRE BROTHERHOOD. I am a lady and therefore do not have the requisite penis necessary to be a "brother." Also I'm a feminist so I worry about the connotations of an exclusively all-male vampire society.(pg 49)
When hairless cats curl up into a ball, their excess belly skin looks a lot like a lady garden, so we can have the best of both worlds by adopted unwanted hairless cats and using them for photo shoots of "vaginas" so that we can make a Pornhub that doesn't exploit actual women. We'll call it "bald pusses" [sic] and technically we can't get sued for lying. (pg 268)
Given that Lawson has expressed her support for both trans people and expresses regular public support for her nonbinary child, you'd think that she'd be better with this. This is another example where voicing your support is great, but really showing it with your actions (in this case changing your language) is even better.
Look, I get that it's (largely) a humor book and sometimes she's even writing as a character.
I realize our language has to be decolonized and that's a slow process. But making language trans and nonbinary inclusive is actually a lot easier than it seems. Even Lawson lampshading her own lack of awareness would fit into the memoir-character for herself she's created (suggestion: "Wait, not that having a penis makes you a man. Or that all men have penises. Hey, what about nonbinary vampires? JUST HOW INCLUSIVE IS THIS VAMPIRE SOCIETY!?! I REFUSE TO BELONG TO AN ARMY OF THE TRANSPHOBIC UNDEAD! They have too many seats in government as it is.")
In a throw-away joke, though, Lawson might have revealed what she really thinks of such corrections:
People say nice guys finish last, but I'm okay with finishing last, because who wants to hang out with the assholes in the front? That sounds miserable. Nice guys finish last but they get to be surrounded with other nice guys, and you know what nice guys bring? Free cheese. Margarita machines. They'll give you a ride home later. They won't even yell at you for being sexist for using "guys" as a universal name for humans because they're nice[.] (pg 39)
Then again, it might seriously be merely a joke.
Either way, I hope Lawson gets educated about this and makes a change. A high percentage of trans people struggle with mental health issues, in no small part because bigotry takes a huge toll on your mental health. You can't advocate for mental health awareness while unwittingly excluding a whole population like that.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
My friend Karen refers to me as "Britney Spears in Mensa" in that I seem like a ditzy weirdo but most of the time I not only am in on the joke but am smart enough to recognize that I AM the joke. (pg 210)
I kind of scratched my head at this one and given the well-deserved public backlash this year to the treatment of Britney Spears both by her parents and the mass media, I'm going to chalk that up as a dated joke that can now peacefully retire.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Of course, Jenny’s long-suffering husband Victor- the Ricky to Jenny’s Lucille Ball- is present throughout. (from the front flap and promotional copy)
Quick question? If Ricky Ricardo is a fictional character (portrayed by Desi Arnaz) and was married in I Love Lucy to fictional character Lucy Ricardo (played by Lucille Ball, to whom Arnaz was married in real life), what exactly does this sentence mean?
I get what was intended, a sort of I Love Lucy dynamic exists in Lawson's recollections with her husband (she says or does something eccentric, he reacts with bewilderment/consternation), but that is so easy to fix. As is, it presents a much weirder dynamic that's actually kind of fascinating, if not at all really representative of what Lawson writes of her marriage. How would Lucille Ball, the real-life actress, have reacted to Ricky Ricardo, the fictional bandleader? I like to think Lawson herself might have left this error in for the oddly entertaining head-scratching it would provoke.
Final Grade: A
DON'T FORGET I'M ON BLOGSPOT NOW!