I told Victor to leave a warning in my coffin of scabie-glitter telling potential robbers not to inject my corpse into rich old people’s faces. Then Victor said that he was going to put a lock on his office door since I apparently didn’t understand what was or wasn’t acceptable to say while he was on a conference call.
Jenny Lawson’s rambling and brutal prose will make you wonder what took you so long to meet her through the pages of this little yellow book and also you are struck with the feeling she is familiar. Maybe she is like your best friend’s mother who constantly forgets her be-lipsticked mugs around the house but always remembers your birthday. Maybe you recall the kindly and vaguely aunt-ish woman across the street with a house full of strangely stuffed objects. Whatever the case, “reading” is not the right verb for Lawson’s book, because it is so much more like a conversation.
"Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things" comes to life somewhere between a memoir about a woman learning how to be better at being crazy and a self-help book for people learning to understand how they are supposed to walk outside their door while their very brain fights against them. Not unlike the taxidermy raccoon which Lawson chose for the image on the book jacket, she takes something as ugly as mental illness and turns it into a figure of manic joy; or, rather, furious happiness.
Lawson is an American journalist, author and blogger. She has been running her blog “The Bloggess” for almost a decade, full of dark humor and honest reflections on her mental illness. She has won several awards including being recognized as one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Mom Bloggers and Forbes listed thebloggess.com as one of their Top 100 Websites for Women. In 2012 her first book, “Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir,” debuted at #1 on the New York Times best-seller list.
This volume does not have a cohesive structure, but rather is a series of essays, interviews and compilations of assorted musings Lawson has assembled under the umbrella of fighting her mental illnesses. In order to understand this theme, Lawson lists her unique diagnoses including but not limited to a high functioning depressive with severe anxiety disorder, moderate clinical depression and mild self-harm issues borne from an impulse-control disorder.
But this doesn’t make her crazy. The reading audience should understand mental illness as not being divided into two camps of “crazy” and “normal.” Readers should understand every single person exists at a particular place on a mental illness scale. Even if a person had the exact diagnosis as another, it doesn’t guarantee they will have the same experience. Sometimes they have more symptoms than they can reasonably be expected to handle.
But Lawson tells the kind of funny and heartfelt stories which can make you forget all those things. She tells stories about going on an epic quest to hold real Australian koalas in a fake koala suit. Various fights with Lawson’s husband over the number of cats she owns are chronicled to become a source of hilarity.
But perhaps my favorite story of Lawson’s is about her portrait. She had staged an elaborate photography session with a friend behind the camera, and the photoshoot was about as chaotic as expected. There was lots of falling, ungracefulness and nothing Hollywood would consider remotely photogenic. But Lawson includes the photograph in the book, and it’s stunning.
It’s a good metaphor for Lawson’s writing. Without filters, she presents the honesty of her life and her outlook with all the bumps, bruises and fallacies. She struggles against the constraints her mind puts on her and sometimes it’s more than she can handle. But what she presents to her readers is unfailing optimism which shines like a lighthouse on a stormy coast. She is someone who can show someone with similar struggles they are not alone.
"Furiously Happy: A Funny Book about Horrible Things" is a breath of fresh air which might blow in the crazies. But that’s all right. We can just be crazy together.
