Saturday, February 7, 2009

Telling her story with humor

I honestly thought that it was kind of sad. She is funny in telling the story of her family, but underneath it wasn't so great. Her mother never got up off the couch and their father drank and gambled away their things.

At the beginning of the book, the sister says that the only reason a person would want to read a book about them was if it was the only choice off the reading trolley in a hospital. At the end she visits her sister at her house and the first thing Lindy asks about the dad was "Has he been drinking?" I wonder what the story of the family would be if her sister wrote the book instead. I imagine it would be much harsher.

I just read another book The Glass Castle by Jeanette Walls for another book club. Jeanette lives this awful life of extreme poverty with a mentally ill mother and a drunk father. She tells about her life in all the gory details. It was a interesting contrast to this book where Zippy uses humor to tell her story instead.

2 comments:

  1. This was one of the things about her exageration - how much was really that funny, that sad, that crazy, that ridiculous. Did her mother really never get off the couch (notice she knitted and read books)? Was her brother really that stand-offish? Is she exagerating or is her memory skewed?

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  2. There is absolutely nothing wrong with knitting and reading! I wonder if my kids think I do nothing else but sit and knit. I get up off the couch all the time. But I do tell them to wait until I'm done with this row.

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