Books like Fiction Ruined My Family: A Memoir

There were some good lines and occasional entertaining anecdotes, but overall: Meh.Her family is wacky and at first I was digging it. Then Jeanne just became awful and I stopped giving a shit about her. I also didn't think her awfulness was entirely the fault of her wacky upbringing. Plenty of people have had wacky, dysfunctional families and have been just fine--in fact, very much unawful. She fixated on stories that were truly unimportant to the plot--I like scatalogical anecdotes as much as the next gal, but I really did NOT need a chapter-long tale about dealing with pubic lice, and not just for the gross-out factor, but moreso because it really had nothing to do with anything--and then spends just a few pages at the end of said crab louse chapter saying, by the way, my mom was unconscious and bleeding on the floor, thank god I found her in time or she would have died. Ditto the shitting in a bag story. Yes, she shits in a bag. And goes on about it for pages. She does not dive deep into overcoming her alcoholism. Isn't it a horrendous, painful process to slog out and recover from an addiction? Jeanne glosses over it. "I stopped drinking and thought I was sort of lame. I wish my mom had stopped too." That's what it distills down to. She keeps talking about wanting to write, but doesn't delve into that very deeply either. Instead she talks about her failure to hold a steady job ad nauseum by describing her outlandish behavior at the jobs she does have (for precious little time). Why don't you talk about writing? Then she skates over the fact that she gets pregnant by a boyfriend she hasn't had very long, marries him, whines about living in LA while penning her memoir, and seems pissed to no end that her father is obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Apparently an editor or early reader said, "Tie in the Fitzgeralds' fucked up marriage to your own parents' relationship" and she did her best. Then she decides her own marriage sucks and is over. She barely talks about what it is like to be a mother. I've heard that having a kid is kind of a big deal. Then she ends the book by talking about how working from home means you have the luxury of cooking your own lunch, which is a joy most people will never know, as they are stuck working in offices. I agree with that part: having lunch at home is awesome. But I don't ever want to read anything else she wrote, including the one-woman play she talks about repeatedly in the book that sounded absurd. There was no redeeming quality to this book--rather it felt like a bunch of anecdotes loosely strung together. I didn't learn anything, I wasn't even clear on how the author grew and changed, I was frustrated that the narrative was so choppy. The title is fabulous. The rest has its moments few and far between but doesn't hold up.