I read this before my mom died, and the amount of comfort and solace (and pain) that the first part of the book gave me actually changed my life. Jennette’s raw honesty, mixed with her absolute genius and witty sense of humor made me realize that I deserve more compassion than I had given myself previously. Besides the child acting and Mormonism, this could have easily been taken straight from my journal.

I read it again, or rather listened this time, a couple weeks after my mom died. Jennette writes pain so well. She has done so many of us a gift by putting her pain into words for those of us who need them so badly.

“Mom didn’t get better, but I will.”

“I’m processing not only the grief of my moms death, but the grief of a childhood, adolescence and young adulthood that I feel I have never truly been able to live for myself. It’s difficult, but the kind of difficult I have pride in.”

For the book itself, my personal connection aside, it is still 5 stars. It takes incredible talent to be able to take such deeply uncomfortable, painful, inappropriate and abusive memories and events and present them in a way that still leaves you chuckling.
Writing this memoir from the ages she was as things happened was so brilliant. It was a risk, and taking that risk absolutely paid off. We can see the absolute absurdity of an abusive and chaotic household, and I love her sense of humor because it doesn’t take away from how abusive it was, but it added that very accurate experience that one has of ridiculousness.

I am someone who really relates to laughing about the absurdity of hard things, because nothing else can accurately show the bigness and strangeness of a situation quite like humor. Jennette is so talented and so smart to bring this humor into our writing to engage our humanity and empathy while we listen to/read about chapters upon chapters of traumatic things.

I’ve never read a memoir, or book, quite like this one, and I doubt I ever will. This is an eternal 5 star read.