Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson

Oh, hey you guys. I’m just over here reading this book by my friend Jenny, which hit No. 1 on the New York Times Bestseller list Ican’tevenbreatheit’ssogood. Gah!

Did you ever have a friend who you like so much that when she succeeds, it feels like you’re succeeding? Seeing Jenny make this happen just cracks me open.

I underlined nearly the entire book, so what follows are the best of the best parts of Let’s Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson. Who is totally a New York Times bestselling author:

I’m from the South, and in Texas we offer drinks to strangers even when we’re waiting in line at the liquor store. In Texas we call that “southern hospitality.” The people who own the liquor store call it “shoplifting.” Probably because they’re Yankees.

And this is exactly what being a mom is like. You’re just going about your day, thinking about how awesome it would be to make nachos, and suddenly you’re all, “Holy shit, I have a baby. I should, like, feed it or something.” And you do, but then a half-hour later you forget again, and you hear her giggling in the other room and you think, “WTF? Whose baby is that?” and then you remember, “Oh, yeah. It’s mine. Weird.”

Special notes for people reading this book who were born after 1990: (1) I kind of hate you. Please stop looking so good in shorts.

I can’t really go into details, because my mother will probably read this, but basically he had a bunk bed in his dorm room (because he’s an only child and only children are obsessed with bunk beds for some reason), so we were on the bottom bunk and I tossed my hair in what I envisioned would be a total porn-star move, except the wooden beam of the bunk bed above us was too low, and so I violently head-butted the wood plank and totally knocked myself out, which is pretty much the least sexy thing you could ever possibly do. Like, if I also lost control of my bowels that would be worse, but not by much. Then when I’d recovered, Victor was all, “Sex concussion, motherfucker!” like it was something to be proud of.

It wasn’t really that [Victor’s parents] disliked me. They just seemed uncomfortable around me. They were polite and kind, but baffled. It was as if their son had unexpectedly shown up with a neck tattoo that read “MAKE ME SOME BASKETTI.”

“I don’t like mimes. I don’t like the fact that they fake a disability.”
“Right? Why stop at mimicking the mute? Where are the clowns pretending to have polio?”

“Do you ever get on the subway and think, ‘Who is that guy in the back? He looks familiar. Did I sleep with him?’ That happens to me all the time.”
“No, that’s never happened to me. Whore. But it has happened to me on the bus a lot.”

Chupacabras are monsters from Mexico that suck blood out of goats. Bizarrely, spell-check is perfectly fine with the word “CHUPACABRA!” in all caps, which makes no sense at all. Unless it’s because it recognizes that you’d use that word only while screaming. Touché, spell-check.

Vocab

Human parvo: “slap cheek syndrome”, virus that causes a rash.

Ed note: On page 188, there’s a photo of me trying to murder Jenny with a cleaver. So please turn to that page first, because I am wearing a jaunty neckerchief.