She's laden with afflictions, among them the compulsion to irreverently write about her life. And as anyone who's read her keen-minded ramblings in The Bloggess knows, said irreverence is incredibly entertaining. She's Jenny Lawson and her book Let's Pretend This Never Happened is to memoirs what Candid Camera was to the unsuspecting. Hear the wise-cracking woman of the ether-world spill at Books and Books this Friday.
What the heck's The Bloggess? Noun. Female variant of "Blogger." Also, a very dangerous and irreverent writer.
What's all this we're hearing about an actual book? I started writing this book 11 years ago as a love letter to my family and it quickly took on a life of its own. Now, 11 years later it's found its audience in a great mass of intellectual misfits who thought they were the only ones to wonder why Jesus wasn't classified as a zombie.
Just what are you asking we pretend never happened? The book is about all of the mortifying moments in my life, growing up as the daughter of a professional taxidermist. I'm incredibly adept at mortifying myself, but as I've gotten older I've realized that the things I wanted to pretend never happened were the things that made me who I am.
Is there something you wished would've happened instead? I wish I would have realized that "weird is good" back when I was younger.
Should we in Miami be at all worried? Totally. If you have hatches, they should be battened.
Now that that's (un)settled, what's next for The Bloggess? Right now I'm touring but I did just say "lady-garden" on CNN so that was a real bucket-list sort of day. I'm trying to find a new goal now that that one is down.
Jenny Lawson appears Friday May 4, 6:30pm at the Gables branch of Books and Books. For more information log on here.
