You wouldn’t think such a “memoir,” written by someone with very little to tell, very little in her life that is not, as she herself puts it, “ordinary,” to be so gosh darn entertaining. Unlike most memoir authors, with their courage or cowardice or victimhood, the author’s only virtue over the rest of us is that she’s fantastically clever and funny; this, though, is plenty to make her book far from “ordinary.”
The virtue of this book is in the details—after all, those are all the author has going for her to distinguish her from any other writer, or indeed any other (wo)Man on the Street. She begins her hilarious spinning of details from the very first—as part of a page-long “Reader’s Agreement,” she cons the unsuspecting reader into agreeing to “thrust your arms upward and emit a loud, staccato Hey! just like circus performers do at the end of each stunt” and that “you agree that yes, we all suffer, perhaps even daily and deeply, but who wants to hear it?,” and even to offer a credit card number and expiration date. On the publisher’s page, where they list copyrights and “not responsible fors,” we learn that her publisher, or maybe just her, is “not responsible for the weather, the moon, or the scalding nature of soup.” How could you not love someone who messes with the mundane like this?
She also, in a helpful way, offers an orientation to her era and lifestyle, right in the first few pages, as she summarizes our day with some key information: Cost of Living Averages, Countries in Power, Top News Stories, Ways We Exercise, Machines We Own, What We Call the Other Driver When Angry (bitch, asshole, fucking bitch, fucking asshole, for the record). This also helpfully provides an orientation to the type of book it’s going to be—hilarious twists on the utterly ordinary, from a very, very clever mind.
The rest of the book is touted as an encyclopedia, with a number of alphabetized entries containing random thoughts, sketches, events, and ponderings from her life. She has a section devoted to her childhood, a timeline that contains everything from being born (1965) to wondering why the sign “NO STANDEES” at front of the bus doesn’t just say “NO STANDING” (1976-1983). She also, in this inspired section, includes a few tables, in which she charts Things That Confused Me For Much Longer than They Should Have (Horatio Alger—baseball player or famous writer?; Which ones were the mittens and which ones were the gloves; Thought they were saying “ten year,” like really good teachers would be granted a ten-year contract. Tenure. Oh. They’re saying tenure.) and What My Friends Were Confused By As Children (I used to think I could see atoms, but it was just dust; I thought that when my parents were little the world was in black and white because all the pictures of them were black and white; I always got the words pedestrian and Presbyterian confused. I didn’t understand why Presbyterians always got the right of way.) Other encyclopedia entries chronicle strange thoughts or habits (“It would be difficult to convince me that leaning has no effect whatsoever on the outcome of my bowling”), random facts she’s picked up from friends (one of the employees at Encyclopedia Britannica designed it so that the spine said “Menage—Ottawa,” and the editors never picked up on it) and daily habits, such as when she used to leave change lying around the neighborhood, along with a note and a prestamped postcard asking the person who picked it up to tell her how she spent it.
Since this book is small in aim and scope, it is unlikely to change any lives; yet, it is well worth the reading. As she weaves certain themes into her encyclopedia—childhood, parenting, happiness, loss—so subtly that a mere skimmer might not notice them, Rosenthal shows herself to be, in addition to being charming and utterly hilarious, warm and wise, a devoted wife and mother, a keen observer of human nature, both in herself and in others, and the foibles of modern life. (We really do call other drivers by those names, after all.)
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