Jessi KleinRezensionen

The positives:

1. Laugh out loud funny at times. This positive is enough to make it all worth while for me, but I'll go on.

2. Dividing women into wolves and poodles is a fun game.

3. It gets very personal. She really goes for it with intimate details of her life.

The negatives:

1. She doesn't really know how to end her essays. They just stop.

2. She obviously has a pretty baller life, but talks about it like it's normal. It's in the service of humor most of the time, so I suppose it's forgivable. But it's still irritating. For example, she makes a joke about hiding in your shoe closet. Um, how many people have freaking closets for just their shoes? Jessi Klein and Carrie Bradshaw.

3. Personally, I kind of hated the essay about getting an epidural. She's trying to say that women should not feel pressure when making birth choices. And then she piles on the pressure to get an epidural. Duhr.

3.5 stars

Loved it!

Nonfiction audio - memoir, humor (~7 hrs, read by the author)

stand up comedian and comedy writer relates humorous stories of growing up a tomboy, getting into stand up comedy, relationships and marriage, health scares/visits to various doctors, including multiple painful ones to fertility specialists, drunk dancing with Dale the Chipmunk, etc.½

Some funny parts, and I loved the structure around Campbell's Hero's Journey. But in many ways I didn't relate to her motherhood experiences and the level of privilege was tough to deal with did those of us who are struggling through newborn life without it.

Starts off, while it is discussing a sort of feminist philosophy of life (similar to that reflected in her co-created Amy Shumer show) as absurdly funny, and full of insights into the ways, major and minor, that the world treats women of varying levels of prettiness and talent. As it gets a bit deeper into the book, turns more essay-based, and its topics become a bit more upscale and picayune, then it loses much of its momentum. But I would recommend the first third of the book as nearly crucial reading for anybody.

Klein's series of essays are loosely structured around the hero's journey (Joseph Campbell), and how it applies to the early years of motherhood. There are laugh-out-loud parts and bleakly honest parts; she is incisive and grateful by turns.

See also: Mama Tried by Emily Flake

Quotes

The truth is that motherhood is a hero's journey. For most of us it's not a journey outward, to the most fantastic and farthest-flung places, but inward, downward, to the deepest parts of your strength, to the innermost buried core of everything you are made of but didn't know was there. (The Hero's Journey, 9)

A mother's heroic journey is not about how she leaves, but about how she stays. (11)

But becoming a mother alters every inch of your body, your routine, your soul, your heart. (Mom Clothes, 52)

I realize some people reading this book may not be parents, so I'll frame it this way: imagine that every time you want to leave the house, you have to get into a bar fight with someone... (The Car Seat, 61)

One of the things that has continuously amazed me about my son is the paradox of how much he seems to love life versus how much he loathes so many of the basic things we must do to keep him alive. (61)

Ever since I became a mother, his safety and my sanity have had trouble existing at the same time. (64)

...suddenly...all your feelings come crashing down on top of you like a tidal wave; love, frustration, exhaustion, awe, sadness. Life usually just gives us one or two of these things to feel at any given time, but occasionally it seems to crumple them all up into a ball and throw them at our head just to remind us that it can. (Somewhere Over the Rainbow, 112)

As someone who has never been able to compartmentalize even one fucking aspect of my life, I can tell you, I don't recommend it. Imagine carrying around literally everything you own in your arms twenty-four hours a day, including forks and knives and all your emotions and USB cords, and never being able to put one thing down. (Your Husband Will Remarry Five Minutes After You Die, 124)

The truth is, there will be times where you actually must step away from what you love in order to love it right, when your absence might be more helpful than your presence. There will be times when in fact the right thing to do is to say, "I need a break." Unfortunately, we live in a culture that philosophically does not believe in the notion of mothers needing a break, and, as a result, doesn't invest politically or economically in making breaks possible. (Change of Hands, 166)

Sometimes I think about how much bad news there is to tell my kid, the endlessly long, CVS receipt scroll of truly fucking terrible things that have happened, and I want to get under the bed and never come out. (Bad News, 196)

We all have things we enjoy that others might not understand. (In Defense of Drinking, 214)

So much of parenting is adhering, as often as possible, to the persona of a steady, measured, self-confident, unafraid person. (Little Books, 243)

All of this is to simply suggest: that from the deeply protective ferocity with which we stand up for our children, we could learn a lot about standing up for ourselves. (The Return, 265)

Best for:
New moms looking for some solidarity.

In a nutshell:
Author Jessi Klein shares brutally honest stories from her life raising a tiny human as an older mother.

Worth quoting:
If I’d had a hard copy I’d probably have underlined a bunch, but it was an audio book, so I didn’t capture any.

Why I chose it:
I generally like her stuff.

Review:
I don’t have kids, and I’m not having kids. So this book is not for me, and my review should be read from that lens. My review is for other people like me, who might be thinking about picking this book up even though they don’t have any kids, nor do they want any. But maybe they have friends who do.

Klein’s writing reminds me a bit of a previous book I read - “All Joy and No Fun.” I absolutely get that Klein loves her son, and I even get the sense that she is happy being a mother. But being a mother, as described by her, sounds brutal. Like, really, really rough. And she has access to a nanny and had a lot of support. Like, if it was just a matter of it ‘taking a village,’ she should be all set. And yet she clearly isn’t.

One thing that stuck with me was the advice her son’s teacher gave about putting together small books when changes are coming, to walk the child through the change so he can be prepared. Man, that’s a great idea. I might start doing that for myself for changes, just to keep myself calm.

I don’t think that parenting is easy for the primary caregiver really ever. But my goodness, this book definitely makes it sound like something pretty freaking brutal. And honestly, probably more people could benefit from some of this type of frank discussion if they are at all on the fence about having kids.

Recommend to a Friend / Keep / Donate it / Toss it:
Donate it (if I had a physical copy)

This is a quite fun, unfiltered look at the four corners of the author’s life: sex, love, child birth, marriage, career, and a bit of everything else. The language is raw, much as you’d expect from a contemporary standup comedian. I’m not sure I learned anything useful, but I enjoyed many laughs.

3.5 stars

Random thoughts that came to me as I was listening to this:

- I'll never think the same way about baths again.
- Wolves vs. Poodles. Among other things, Wolves wear underwear; Poodles wear lingerie.
- What kind of monster keeps chocolate in the fridge?
- This book is narrated by the author and, while I thought she did a bang-up job in general, I thought it was odd that she pronounced "princess" and "prinzess." I've never heard a "c" pronounced as a "z" in English.
- GET THE EPIDURAL!!! (That's from both the author and myself.)

Screamingly funny. Try to read without falling over. I failed about 183 times.

Absolutely and scarily relatable. I love Big Mouth. Thanks for the rec, Rachel P!

I laughed out loud in public places many times while reading this book. I also enjoyed her honest reflections on various feelings and experiences, especially her trials with the performance of being a woman.

Rounding up from a 3.5 to a 4. I like her writing style a lot. Some of these memoir style books written by comedians can feel rambling. This one, while decisively not rambling, did suffer from whiplash, springing from topic to topic in short bursts of chapters.

I really expected to love this book and feel a sort of kinship with the author as I, too, grew up as a tomboy. Sadly, there wasn't much I could relate to. She calls herself a "wolf" and talks how she'll never be a "poodle", but she's the girliest tomboy I've ever heard of. She thinks nothing of dropping nearly $270 on eye cream, she gets waxed on a regular basis, she vacations in absolute dream locations, the list goes on. It was a fast read but not one I could relate to in any part, except one chapter. Not to mention, when I finished the book I looked her up online to see how "wolf" like she was. (I knew nothing of her except that she wrote for the Amy Schumer show.) She's absolutely gorgeous - a Natalie Portman doppelganger. I sort of feel duped. (For lack of a better word.) I'm glad I borrowed this from the library. I would have been extremely disappointed if I had paid for the book.

I listened to this on audio book and it was really enjoyable. Sometimes the content is a little on the fringe on what was comfortable for me to listen to - but most of it was really funny and relatable. It went by very quickly for me and I thought it was really well and tightly written.

Pretty interesting read- similar to the other female comedian biographies.

I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t 100% sure who Jessi Klein was when I bought this book. Still not sure if I had previous knowledge of her before reading it. Anyway, I really, really enjoyed You’ll Grow Out of It. Jessi seems like someone I would like to be friends with. Most of her stories really resonated with me (although a few left me scratching my head. And why is she so obsessed with Zooey Deschanel?). This book made for a great airport/airplane read, which is all I needed today.

Nope. This also wasn't my sense of humor. One of her last essays was about how women need to stop pressuring other women to have natural birth, which ended up sounding like she was pressuring other women to NOT have natural birth. I lost my sense of humor during that part. And her blitheness...(thank you, Caitlin Moran!) she did not really acknowledge her privilege very often, which was off putting. Honestly, though, that's all "overlookable" if I connected with her humor, which I didn't, so I'm chalking this up to taste. She (Klein) did a great job on the audiobook, though.

Fun listen - Klein reads it so its almost like a stand up show.

I don't have a lot to say about this. Funny, smart, deeply honest. A truly enjoyable and thought provoking read (or rather, listen.)½

DNF:

A good many memoirs are completely effective without the reader needing to connect with or like the narrator. But for You'll Grow Out of It, I found myself struggling with the book precisely because I felt so alienated from the narrator. The book's back material talks a lot about Klein being a tomboy as a child, and the first essay or so discuss her confusion about what it was to be feminine and whether she wanted to be that/why it didn't feel "natural" to her to perform femininity. And I thought, "Cool, this is going to be a funny, relatable discussion of being a woman in 21st century America, and how we sometimes feel at odds with what that's supposed to mean even while still wanting to do it 'right.'" And then it just kind of went off the rails for me. The funny bits seemed way more dark or depressing or mean than funny. And as Klein moved on from discussing her childhood, a lot of statements (that I guess were supposed to be funny?) started creeping in that undermine the idea that we can pick and choose which bits of femininity feel right to each of us (or reject them all) and that's fine and good and right. At one point, while discussing buying really expensive makeup, she says, "This despite the fact that I. . . still have trouble buying socks that don't come in a bag because I just can't believe a singe pair costs more than six bucks" (p. 31). There's some implication in there that there's something wrong with buying socks that way, that the "feminine" thing (or adult thing?) to do is definitely not buying the kinds of socks that come six to a pack. And the thing is just peppered with these little "funny" moments that make it clear what behaviors are doing it wrong. She makes a similar comment at some point about the time when she was still wearing cotton underwear and not grooming her lady bits. Like becoming an adult women means, you, what, wear silk next to the skin and get waxed twice a month? I mean, come on. Femininity is a complicated subject, yes, and it means different things to different people and what some of us would never be caught dead doing is something others of us couldn't imagine leaving the house without having done. I thought that's what this book was going to be about. Maybe it gets there? But to the point I got (~87 pages in), I was done with the assumptions about the "right" ways to do things and the urg feeling the book was giving me. YMMV.½

I believe I first became aware of Ms. Klein when she would appear on Best Week Ever. I loved that show. I have always been someone who goes to be early, so I would miss the first airing on Friday nights, and (if I’m remembering it correctly) catch the weekend rerun. Because when you go to bed early on Friday, you obviously are up in time to watch a show at 9AM on Saturday.

I also recall squealing a bit when I saw Ms. Klein briefly on camera during Inside Amy Schumer. So when I learned she had a book out – obviously I was going to buy it.

This book is delightful. I might use that word a bit too much, but I don’t care, because that’s the perfect word to describe this book. It’s funny. It’s sweet but not sickeningly so. It feels intimate and honest but I didn’t read anything where I thought was over the top. Above all, I found it to be extremely relatable. Not because I, too, am an Emmy-award winning writer and comedian. But because the stories she tells can connect back to feelings that I think a lot of us have had.

Like that moment where you can almost observe yourself doing the absolutely wrong thing when it comes to an ex? (If you don’t have at least one of those moments, I’d love to know your secret but also, I’m kind of wondering if you’re a cyborg.) Or perhaps the moment when, just for maybe a few hours, or a weekend, you decide to go totally sincere, and just enjoy an experience without letting your cynical side take over completely. Look, she goes to what is essentially a fancy hippie spa, and has a moment, and even though I will never go to said fancy hippie spa, the feelings Ms. Klein is able to share through her exquisite writing transcend the environment and get to the soul of the emotions.

But, again, there’s also a ton of humor. Every chapter – including the final one that deals with infertility – is full of clever asides or one-liners that effortlessly raise the tone. And the footnotes! Ah, I love a good footnote, and this book is full of them.

So go! Reserve your copy at the library, or download it, or, my preference, buy a copy and read it and then gift it to a friend.

Read it read it read it. Jessi Klein is the voice in the back of my head, but actually funny.

Being the memoirs of a comedy writer, I expected this to be funny. The words, themselves are, but the narration, but the author herself, rather than fun and conversational, is dry and whiny, which actually make the whole audiobook just depressing. I recommend reading this one instead of listening.