Furiously Happy

Jenny Lawson made a community of crazy when she started writing about her struggles with her mental health on her blog. She writes about the times when life is just bizarre – most of the time, actually – and when it feels like too much to handle. People fell in love with her first because she’s hilarious, and second because she’s honest. She hasn’t so much defeated the stigma attached to mental illness as she has hunted it down with an army of taxidermy animals and a felted vagina* (I really can’t stress enough how much you should read this book). Clearly our collective crazy is something that we want to talk about.

Furiously Happy is her second memoir. It calls itself a funny book about horrible things. And it has a taxidermy raccoon called Rory on the cover. He’s the happiest damn taxidermy racoon you ever did see. I promise.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

See? He’s loving life.

Jenny Lawson’s funny and ridiculous stories just make you feel better about life. There is a sincere tone to all of her essays that made my heart feel full throughout. It is this truthfulness at the centre of the work that allows Jenny Lawson’s writing to veer so fluidly between talking about laminated cats and self-harm, I think. Whatever emotion she is in, she is in fully, and as a result, so are we.

I ended up giggling with this book in the corner of a library (not recommended. People get annoyed) and doing that thing where someone is talking but you can only nod because if you talk you will inevitably cry. Kind of like after you watch a really emotionally manipulative advert and you don’t want the people around you to know it got to you because you’re smarter than that. Except Jenny Lawson isn’t trying to sell you a new phone plan. She’s just telling you about her life, which, like most people’s, is made up of the pretty great and the very bad.

‘…There is something wonderful in accepting someone else’s flaws, especially when it gives you the chance to accept your own and see that those flaws are the things that make us human.’

Furiously Happy, for me at least, was a book that demanded I see life outside of my own skin sack. When you look at the community that Jenny Lawson has created you notice one overwhelming truth: everybody is struggling. For the past few months I’ve been feeling pretty lost in life, and when you’re in that space it becomes really easy to consider yourself… kind of a failure. Reading this made me feel – for a little while, at least – like that’s bullshit. Everybody’s struggling with something. Whatever negative feelings we’re dealing with right now don’t make us failures, they just make us people. And that’s totally okay.

‘…Stop judging yourself compared to shiny people. Avoid the shiny people. The shiny people are a lie. Or get to know them enough to realize they aren’t so shiny after all. Shiny people aren’t the enemy. Sometimes we’re the enemy when we listen to our malfunctioning brains that try to tell us that we’re alone in our self-doubt, or that it’s obvious to everyone that we don’t know what the shit we’re doing.’

*Reading Jenny Lawson’s life makes your own more amusing. While writing this review I searched through the whole book asking myself what was that vagina made of? and then, after a while had passed and I still hadn’t found it did I imagine the vagina? and, eventually finally! The vagina! This is only one of the many gifts reading Furiously Happy provides.