Broken (in the best possible way)

by Jenny Lawson

Overview

Notes From Your Bookseller

Jenny Lawson fans rejoice! This new collection of essays on depression and mental health, physical health, family, insurance companies, or shoes that go missing is often raw and hard, but incisive and original. Lawson’s generosity in sharing her darkest moment is matched by an equal capacity to find the absurd, the ridiculous, the sweet and tender, and to serve it up with a deliciously skewering, wicked sense of wry humor.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Furiously Happy and Let’s Pretend This Never Happened comes a deeply relatable book filled with humor and honesty about depression and anxiety.

As Jenny Lawson’s hundreds of thousands of fans know, she suffers from depression. In Broken, Jenny brings readers along on her mental and physical health journey, offering heartbreaking and hilarious anecdotes along the way.

With people experiencing anxiety and depression now more than ever, Jenny humanizes what we all face in an all-too-real way, reassuring us that we’re not alone and making us laugh while doing it. From the business ideas that she wants to pitch to Shark Tank to the reason why Jenny can never go back to the post office, Broken leaves nothing to the imagination in the most satisfying way. And of course, Jenny’s long-suffering husband Victor—the Ricky to Jenny’s Lucille Ball—is present throughout.

A treat for Jenny Lawson’s already existing fans, and destined to convert new ones, Broken is a beacon of hope and a wellspring of laughter when we all need it most.

Includes Photographs and Illustrations

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250077035
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/06/2021
Pages:	304
Sales rank:	154,905
Product dimensions:	6.10(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jenny Lawson is an award-winning humorist known for her great candor in sharing her struggle with mental illness. She lives in Texas with her husband and daughter and was constantly “buying too many books” (“Not a real thing,” she insists), so she decided to skip the middleman and just started her own bookshop, which also serves booze because books and booze are what magic is made of. She has previously written Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy, both of which were #1 New York Times bestsellers. She also wrote You Are Here, which inexplicably made it onto the New York Times bestseller list in spite of the fact that it was basically a very fun coloring book. She would like to be your friend unless you’re a real asshole. And yes, she realizes that this whole paragraph is precisely the reason she shouldn’t be allowed to write her own bio.

Table of Contents

Jenny Lawson, Full-Grown Mammal: An Introduction 1

Already Forgot I Wrote This 5

Six Times I've Lost My Shoes While Wearing Them: A List that Shouldn't Exist 13

And Then I Bought Condoms for My Dog 22

Rainbow Fire 27

All of the Reasons Why I'm Not Coming to Your Party 33

Samuel L. Jackson Is Trying to Kill Me 44

How Do Dogs Know They Have Penises? 59

These Truisms Leave Out a Lot of the Truth 66

An Open Letter to My Health Insurance Company 72

Pm Not Going Outside Anymore. 79

The Things We Do to Quiet the Monsters 85

The Golden (Shower) Years 111

Awkwarding Brings Us Together 116

That Time I Got Haunted by Lizards with Bike Horns 131

We Are Who We Are Until We Aren't Anymore 142

Introverts Unite! (But Sweet Baby Jesus, Not in Real Life.) 150

My Dentist Hates Me 156

Am I Even Still Alive? 161

The Secret to a Long Marriage 168

So I'm Paying to Beat the Shit Out of Myself? 175

Anxiety Is a Lost Watch I Never Saw 183

The Eight Billionth Argument I Had with Victor This Week 188

Sometimes There Is Beauty in Breaking 190

No One Wants Tour Handwritten "Good for One Free Massage" Coupons, Darryl 197

I Feel It in My Bones 204

Editing Is Hell. Mostly for Editors. 206

The First Satanic Ritual I Ever Saw 218

Damaged Good(s) 225

My House Is a Garbage Fire Because I Clean It 230

And That's Why I Can Never Go Back to the Post Office Again 233

I Am a Magpie 240

Up Divorce Creek Without a Paddle (Because the Guide Didn't Trust Me Not to Push Victor Overboard with It) 244

Eclipse (Not the Twilight Book. The Other Kind.) 249

Business Ideas to Pitch on Shark Tank 261

Strange New Weather Patterns 271

Souls 275

Acknowledgments 283

Editorial Reviews

01/11/2021

Lawson (You Are Here) returns with a wry and entertaining take on her battle with depression, anxiety, and rheumatoid arthritis. As always, the author is unrivaled in her ability to use piercing humor and insight to take on heavy subjects. In the poignant “I Already Forgot I Wrote This,” Lawson shares moving reflections on her family’s history of dementia (“My mother jokes about it now and I do too, because you either laugh or you cry”). In “The Things We Do to Quiet the Monsters,” she details the transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment she underwent to cure her medication-resistant mental health issues (“It feels like an invisible chisel drilling holes into your head while you have an ice-cream headache and also you’re paying for it to happen to you“), and she excoriates her insurance provider in “An Open Letter to My Insurance Company”: “you decided that it ‘wasn’t medically necessary’ that I have the drug that had kept me away from suicide.” In “Six Times I’ve Lost My Shoes While Wearing Them,” she chronicles the strange places she’s lost her left shoe after “walking out of it” due to fluctuating ankle swelling from chronic arthritis. The beauty of these essays lies in Lawson’s unfailing hopefulness amid her trials. “After all,” she notes, “we are changed by life... it puts its teeth in us... makes us who we are.” Lawson’s fans are in for a treat. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Jenny Lawson

“I consider Jenny Lawson to be a therapist colleague—not because she’s a fellow clinician, but because in courageously sharing the truth of her story, she makes us feel instantly seen and fully understood in all of our alternately painful and hilarious humanity.” —Lori Gottlieb, New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk To Someone

“Even when I was funny, I wasn’t this funny.” —Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors

“Lawson’s self-deprecating humor is not only gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate; it allows her to speak…in a real and raw way.” —O, The Oprah Magazine

“[Lawson] writes with a rambling irreverence that makes you wish she were your best friend.” —Entertainment Weekly

“The Bloggess writes stuff that actually is laugh out loud, but you know that really you shouldn’t be laughing and probably you’ll go to hell for laughing, so maybe you shouldn’t read it. That would be safer and wiser.” —Neil Gaiman

“Jenny made me laugh so hard I feared for my safety!” —Allie Brosh, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Hyperbole and a Half

“You’ll laugh, wince, writhe in discomfort, cry, then laugh again….But the two things you’ll never do is doubt Jenny’s brilliance or her fearlessness when it comes to having honest discussions about mental illness, shame, and the power of human resilience.” —Brené Brown

“Take one part David Sedaris and two parts Chelsea Handler and you’ll have some inkling of the cockeyed humor of Jenny Lawson.” —Parade

“The comic queen of the broken toys has risen, and her name is Jenny Lawons.” —Christopher Moore, New York Times bestselling author of Lamb, A Dirty Job, and Fool

“Jenny Lawson is hilarious, snarky, witty, totally inappropriate, and ‘Like Mother Teresa, Only Better.’” —Marie Claire

From the Publisher

02/01/2021

Lawson returns with her signature mix of humorous antics and heartfelt self-reflection in this follow-up to 2015's Furiously Happy. She shares with raw honesty her experiences living with mental illness, including depression and anxiety, as well as rheumatoid arthritis and other physical conditions. She openly discusses her suicidal thoughts, detailing her transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment and its results, and shares her frustration with her health insurance company. Being Lawson, it's not all gloomy subjects; she also includes an uncomfortable exchange at the post office, a list of awkward moments shared by her fans, unusual encounters with animals, pitches for Shark Tank, and marriage advice. Lawson describes her book as "probably horribly offensive," and those who don't mind profanity will enjoy her frank sense of humor. She excels at advocating for self-acceptance, embracing and sharing failures, and laughing at the difficulties and absurdities of life. Her ability to blend poignant self-reflection and candid humor allows for the darkness of life to become less alienating, which makes her stories about failing and flourishing to be both engaging and relatable. VERDICT Lawson already has thousands of fans, and she's bound to pick up more with this latest memoir. Recommended for all public libraries.—Anitra Gates, Erie Cty. P.L., PA

Library Journal

2021-01-27
The Bloggess is back to survey the hazards and hilarity of imperfection.

Lawson is a wanderer. Whether on her award-winning blog or in the pages of her bestselling books, she reliably takes readers to places they weren’t even aware they wanted to go—e.g., shopping for dog condoms or witnessing what appears to be a satanic ritual. Longtime fans of the author’s prose know that the destinations really aren’t the point; it’s the laugh-out-loud, tears-streaming-down-your-face journeys that make her writing so irresistible. This book is another solid collection of humorous musings on everyday life, or at least the life of a self-described “super introvert” who has a fantastic imagination and dozens of chosen spirit animals. While Furiously Happy centered on the idea of making good mental health days exceptionallygood, her latest celebrates the notion that being broken is beautiful—or at least nothing to be ashamed of. “I have managed to fuck shit up in shockingly impressive ways and still be considered a fairly acceptable person,” writes Lawson, who has made something of an art form out of awkward confessionals. For example, she chronicles a mix-up at the post office that left her with a “big ol’ sack filled with a dozen small squishy penises [with] smiley faces painted on them.” It’s not all laughs, though, as the author addresses her ongoing battle with both physical and mental illness, including a trial of transcranial magnetic stimulation, a relatively new therapy for people who suffer from treatment-resistant depression. The author’s colloquial narrative style may not suit the linear-narrative crowd, but this isn’t for them. “What we really want,” she writes, “is to know we’re not alone in our terribleness….Human foibles are what make us us, and the art of mortification is what brings us all together.” The material is fresh, but the scaffolding is the same.

Fans will find comfort in Lawson’s dependably winning mix of shameless irreverence, wicked humor, and vulnerability.

Kirkus Reviews