Review: Let's Pretend This Never Happened by Jenny Lawson

Jenny Lawson, I love you.

This is the story of my life, except completely different. A normal conversation between me and just about any other human on the planet goes something like this - "No, that's not the weird part. So then we - what? No that's not the weird part. I will tell you when we get to the weird part. Can you just listen? None of that is important, the important thing is..." Because apparently my entire life differs greatly from the average human experience. People give me the half cocked flopped ear expression of the RCA Victor dog. (You probably have no idea who that is. It's ok. I expect that.) Then they slowly say "You... should write a book." I don't want to write a book.  Jenny Lawson just wrote it for me. (Did I mention I love you?)

Let's Pretend This Never Happened is the best memoir I've ever read. Because it is about me. Except, as I already said, completely different. (Mine had way less taxidermy but far more domestic violence. I'm the ABC AfterSchool Special to her Independent Lens.) I even love the subtitle A Mostly True Memoir. Every person in my life (except my sibling) either has or will at some point turn to me with a horrified expression to say "Wait, you've been telling the truth. Everything you've said is true. All of those things, they happened." Of course they did. Why would I bother to make something like that up? I've learned to be polite about it but it's really kind of offensive. I never understood what they were feeling. Because of what I was feeling, their hand to mouth horror didn't mean anything. Until I read Let's Pretend This Never Happened. (Oh my god. Jenny Lawson. All those things. They happened.) Suddenly I knew what it was like to be a normal person waiting for me to get to the weird part. That was a gift.

It was such a gift I said thank you, because I am polite like that. I also called Let's Pretend This Never Happened something like Angela's Ashes, but for Rednecks. Hopefully that didn't offend her. Rednecks isn't quite the right term, but People Raised By Vaguely Southern Parents With An Affinity For Rural Poverty And Scaring Their Neighbors doesn't roll off the tongue the same way. Folks get what you mean by Rednecks, even if it brings a scary KKKonnotation you didn't intend. (Even Malachy McCourt told me to write a book. Mr. McCourt, if you're reading this - please check out Jenny Lawson. I think you'll like her.) Let's Pretend This Never Happened is much higher on the laughter scale than Angela's Ashes was. There is no dual citizenship or starving Irish children but we can't hold that against Lawson. I am sure if the opportunity to starve in an Irish slum presented itself she would have taken mental notes for her future memoir. She is also not a teacher. (This is a loss to children everywhere but possibly a relief to their parents. People don't understand the importance of diversity in education.)

Look, I don't even want to tell you what's in here. Just buy it. Pre-order it. Make a note. Set a calendar alarm. I don't care. Because if you can't laugh at a book filled with dead animals, vultures digging up graves and a young high school girl giving a cow a pelvic exam, then I don't know what you would enjoy. Frankly, I'm concerned. Because I thought it was hilarious. Yes, this is something of a blog to book experience. It doesn't read like one. While I would have moved a chapter here or there and ended in a different place those are minor quibbles. Jenny Lawson deserves a cabinet full of awards and a truck full of money dumped into an empty swimming pool for her enjoyment. Because I'm not the weird one in the conversation.

Things You Should Listen To: Adelaide by Meg Myers

I don't do music reviews because if I started I would never get anything else done. Music and me, we have a deep personal relationship. Sometimes we hurt each other. It's hard to talk about. (Ok, not at all but that sounded deep and dramatic which is absolutely required for musical discussion.) Right. Just listen to Adelaide by Meg Myers (which you will love) and then go download her EP. Thank me when she's famous and you get to say "Oh, Myers? Right. I started with her when she was fronting that band..." which will totally be a lie, like people who say they bought Tori Amos as a metal head, but it will impress the gullible. Play Adelaide again. You know you want to.

It's The Service - A Tokidoki Story

Favola Bello, Ramblers Bowling, Famiglia Stellina

After a Twitter conversation with Dianne Farr I was thinking about branding. The Big Six have relied heavily on consumer loyalty to the concept of the publishing industry to carry them through a time of unprecedented change. Along the way they have discarded numerous opportunities to maximize their future. Pricing is an art. People don't care about your production cost, they care about an ephemeral thing called value. If the consumer perceives the value to surpass the cost, they will purchase. Your item cost being fifty cents or fifty dollars is irrelevant to what the market will pay. When the consumer does not perceive the value to justify the cost, they become very vocal about your (previously irrelevant) cost. As a seller, defending your price is the absolute wrong place to be.

The primary component of value is personal to each consumer. Where the business has an opportunity to create an increased perception of worth is in service or quality. Recently I had a service opportunity with tokidoki that I think illustrates where consumer perception affects the bottom line. The bags in the Fall 2011 collection had some serious quality control issues (double printed fabrics, lack of seam closures). After 3 exchanges I kept 2 bags that were still imperfect because of my perception of service from the company. When the Winter 2011 collection was released I ordered two new bags and planned for a third. (Yes, I have a handbag issue. I've heard you talk about shoes.) The bags which arrived were not the same bags pictured on the website. While the company eventually corrected their mixed up product descriptions, they did not reach out to customers who had placed orders during the errors. I believe that they wanted to make it right, and I believe that they care about consumer satisfaction, but the result was my returning both bags. I ended up making a single purchase from a seller I could speak with on the phone. When I buy directly from tokidoki they make a much larger profit than when I buy from a third party seller. A few careless mistakes after a legitimate concern created a long lasting erosion of consumer trust, and ultimately a smaller market share.

Publishing is no different. Avon was a very trusted imprint at one time, and they are working hard to regain consumer trust. Experimenting with pre-sale pricing of ebooks while looking to create a new avenues of ARC distribution, Avon appears eager to regain ground ceded in the early days of ebook adoption. On the other hand, Harlequin was quick to understand the challenges of the new marketplace. They offered a direct storefront to consumers with a DRM free publishing arm. As a result my perception of value has changed. Prior to Agency pricing I felt that Avon was a quality imprint with a few clunkers and Harlequin was a clunker imprint with a few quality books. The service of direct purchase and competitive pricing completely flipped my perception of the two imprints. Where I would previously have greeted a poorly edited (or written) Avon title as a surprising exception, I now viewed it as typical. Charting my reviews over the last few years of both imprints my hits and misses haven't shifted. It is only my perception of those hits and misses that changed, which is a purely emotional consideration. (Obviously this plays out to other imprints as well, I use them as an example.)

One of the concepts I had pitched to Ms Farr as a missed opportunity was a world where a customer could walk into a store, purchase a Valentine's Day card and have it loaded with an ebook to give their intended recipient. Another was reclaiming used book sales by offering consumers the chance to "resell" their digital files to others with a portion of the discounted price returning to the publisher. The adoption of DRM was (to my mind) the single biggest factor in allowing Amazon to dominate the ebook market. When a consumer is pushed into a closed system, the one who runs the system best wins. If publishers had offered loading stations, scannable ebook gift cards, personal imprint store fronts, discounted subscriptions, any number of dynamic pricing possibilities, they could have capitalized on the now squandered consumer loyalty. Piracy is an unwinnable war. A certain number of people enjoy stealing, that is a fact of life. Most consumers want to pay a fair price for goods and want the maker of the goods to benefit. Packaging the desire to be honest with direct revenue paths would have allowed publishing to reposition themselves in the new marketplace. Setting up an adversarial relationship with the consumer left the way clear for Amazon to dominate. In the end, everyone loses.

Watching the Big Six interact with consumers and libraries I wonder who will rise to challenge Amazon after the Big Six fall. Maybe it will be Starbucks. Pick up your Grande Half Soy Mocha and reload your girlfriend's book card.

In Which Meoskop Comes To A Realization!

Once upon a time, while I was staring in shock at my internet bill, AOL offered me a position reviewing books. Free books and free internet?  Sold. Until one day the perfect storm of flat rate access and a heroine named Blueberry Hill sent me running. (My review was polite, but all these decades later I can still quote my private emotions. This book is an argument against English as a written language.)  Time passed. I was in a bookstore and saw Diane Farr's second or third regency on the shelf. The cover blurb seemed naggingly familiar, as if I'd ... written it. Go me. I waited for my reaction but I felt nothing. Well, nothing but an urge to read another Diane Farr novel. Life went on. I was still a Writer.

Instead of actually sitting down and writing a book, working out a plot, imagining characters, I thought there was some answer that would instill in me a desire to be an author. A desire I still didn't have. Could I do better than Blueberry Hill? Absolutely. Did I want to? It was time to figure this stuff out. Who better to ask about how to avoid Writing than authors?  I'm pretty sure I drove Edith Layton crazy. She explained a lot about the business while gently indicating that maybe I didn't really want to be a Writer? Nora Roberts told me to suck it up and do it, then promptly killed my brother off in a J.D. Robb book. I think she was annoyed. Kay Hooper suggested finding what I wanted to write about then letting the stories unfold. This was pre-Seinfeld, so I had no idea writing about nothing was an option.

Julia Quinn admired my shoe displays, envied my pretzel bites, and explained (on more than one occasion) that the desire to tell a story generally (but not always) comes before the desire to sell it. I told her I like to sell things, actually. She thought I should look into becoming an agent. I can't. I said, I'm a Writer. Everyone says so. We agreed that was a shame. I thought she was absolutely brilliant at selling things, and very fine indeed at telling stories. So I was almost there! Julia moved out of New England. Joe Wallace thought I should keep honing my craft, or something equally gentle. It began to dawn on me that annoying authors wasn't going to make either of us any happier. I kept reviewing. I'd go to this website, I'd go to that website. I told myself I was reviewing books to learn more about how they were constructed, which would lead to a better understanding of what sold. Once I understood what sold, I could work in that direction and not waste my time as a Writer.  (True fact, once you're an author you get letters from prison inmates. I already knew prison inmates. One more way I was building my portfolio!)

Along the way I lost interest in reviewing. Authors liked me, Publishers didn't mind me, but the fans hated me. Why wasn't I supportive? Why did I have to say such snarky things? Didn't I understand how hard it was to be a Writer? Of course I did! That's why I wasn't doing it! I stopped taking or asking for arcs. I didn't maintain a website. I'd put a thing here or there in my blog until Amazon asked if I wanted to join Vine. I dunno, I said - I've sort of done this thing before and I don't really get on well with RWA, and I think authors are just people and omg Blueberry Hill. Amazon told me it was ok, I could choose the books I wanted to read. Suddenly, I was reviewing again. I started reading review sites like Smart Bitches and Dear Author. It wasn't all daisy chains in the meadows and girl scout songs. Reviewing had changed. After a pleading letter where I promised to make a stop motion film and revealed an embarrassing incident from my past involving a toilet, 80's hair and an heirloom bottle opener the Smart Bitches gave me a chance to review an E-Reader . 

( I didn't actually know how to make a stop motion film.) 

Suddenly, I was talking about books again. For my blog, for Amazon, for random strangers about to purchase a copy of Twilight. My brother asked me if I had ever really wanted to be a writer. I realized I had not. Not even a little bit. I didn't want to hold a book in my hands that I had written or share a saga with someone or do a book signing or attend a convention. I just liked authors as people, I liked reading, and I like talking about books. So I am very sorry Mom, friends, customers, baggage handlers, that girl in fourth grade, teachers, and all the other people who want so very, very much to read my first book. I'm not actually a Writer. And I am sorry to all the authors I begged for the secret, who told me the same thing. Being an author is not something a person would choose to be. It's something they are.

PS - Mom, I'm also sorry I wasn't gay. I know that was important to you too.
PPS - If your heroine was the aforementioned Blueberry Hill, um, I'm sorry for bringing it up again and all, um, I'm sure that there were, um, really good parts about the book that I, um, don't remember anymore.

Meoskop, And How She Got Here

Once, a very long time ago (before they invented dirt) there were any number of people who felt I should become a Writer. I can't say I particularly wanted to be a Writer but it was the focus of so many people for so long that I supposed I believed I should want to be a Writer. I liked reading. I liked winning contests at school (the easiest way to do that was writing something bleak and referencing age inappropriate influences). My mother wanted to be a Writer. So I began writing. I wrote short fiction that cribbed heavily from Andre Norton. I embarked on a stunning amount of really bad poems. Then I ran away from home and put it all in my checked luggage. The airline promptly lost it. (It wasn't even proper luggage, more of a large plastic bag with a zipper).

I was so relieved. Sure, everyone else was upset for me. I made sad faces, I bemoaned fate - but now it was gone! All of it! I didn't have to try and edit it or worry about why I didn't love working on it. It was gone. Hands brushed, end of story, all done! A few months later they found it. The airline person that phoned me was very excited. Obviously, I must be heartbroken because he'd taken a look at my binders. I was a Writer, and my work was important. I made all the appropriate expressions of glee. It seemed wrong to take his big moment away by saying what I was really thinking. "Well, hell." Suddenly, I was a Writer again. Even the baggage handlers thought I should be one. Let's count - parents, teachers, friends, baggage handlers. (That's the whole world, right?) Every year from about age nine my mother gave me a copy of whatever that book was writers used to send out packages in exchange for rejection notices. I duly collected my notices while she reminded me that time was running out on My Goal of being a Young Author.

Having run away from home I was no longer under any obligation to collect the notices, so I stopped submitting work. I started working in retail. I liked it. Almost everything about retail was satisfying with the exception of the customers who said I was much too good for retail. So when they asked what my Real Job was I would tell them I was a Writer. It always made sense to them. They could tell I was a Writer! I found that a bit insulting, as I don't particularly care for Writers. I liked authors. Authors were people who grumbled under their breath, walked about in their pajamas and never talked about their work. Writers didn't have anything published and rarely talked about anything but their work. After my mother told me I had missed my chance to the be Youngest Writer it was important to her that I not lose my chance to be an Average Writer, although if I didn't get it in gear I'd have to settle for being a Late Life Writer. Maybe I could write a book for her, since she had much better ideas. Then she could edit it and change what I did wrong, and we could go on a book tour together. (Did I mention I'd already run away from home?)

Obviously, I was going to have to look into this Writing thing a bit more.