Well I had an interesting weekend.
I do not refer here to the culmination of two months of Christmas shopping (thank you Union Square holiday market,) or my time spent intermittently watching trashy television and drinking spiked punch with friends. Rather, my weekend was illuminating in the revelation that my grandmother—mentioned on this blog before in reference to her self-published novel Vision Quests—has released another book, this one a 410-page tell-all memoir outlining everything from the most mundane to the most intimate details about my family.
A copy of said memoir is waiting for me at my mom’s house in Pennsylvania (yes, my grandmother had whatever the opposite of presence of mind is to send each of us individual copies, the authorly equivalent of spitting in someone’s food and then proudly telling them about it) so I have yet to peruse the book in its entirety. But through the powers of Amazon, I managed to glean that it’s full of the kinds of details, anecdotes and personal correspondence that I typically only share with my closest confidants, things I confess to girlfriends and significant others over multiple bottles of wine, not stuff I generally shout from the rooftops.
As I’ve mentioned, this is not my grandmother’s first foray into self-publishing, but it is the first time her books have focused on anything vaguely resembling reality. My family’s shock (limited by the fact that Nana is and has always been a slightly crazy person who does slightly crazy things) is tempered by the reality that this book cannot possibly sell. Not only because it’s surely one of the worst-written things Amazon has ever permitted to appear in its inventory, but because what the memoir has in completely unnecessary and torturous detail it lacks in marketability to literally anyone who isn’t in my family. A detailed list of everything I’ve eaten in the last 30 days would have greater public appeal.
Anyway, my point here is not to add to the exposure, however minute, that my family faces by virtue of my grandmother word-vomiting 30+ years of irrelevant observations, in a tome to which I refuse to link. I suppose a more rational person would find a discreet way to cope with the sudden publication of intimate details of their childhood, something less foolhardly than referencing said publication on the Internet. But having spent the last few days speculating on how strange it must feel to read yourself as a character in someone else’s book, I suppose I felt the irony was too great to overlook, or to leave out of this review.
Continue reading “Grandmas gone wild”
couldreads 