These Books Made Us Feel So Seen

I mention this book all the time and it’s because it makes me feel like less of a weirdo. Or rather, it makes me feel like I’m not the only one. Quick recap: This book is a humor memoir that grew out of Brosh’s webcomic/blog. It tackles everything from laziness to adulting to depression in a way that makes me feel that perhaps I wrote the book myself while in a fugue state? A childhood marked by a sugar obsession so strong I hid containers of frosting under my bed? It’s me. An adulthood marked by a complete lack of self-motivation? It’s me. Debilitating depression and self-loathing? Also, sometimes me. I occasionally reread this book and, every time, the connection I feel to Brosh takes my breath away. Her stories also make me laugh so hard I end up crying. For the love of all that is holy, read the damn book.

I mentioned this one recently, too. Mostly because Irby’s experience with growing older so closely mirrors my own. In this comedic essay collection, Irby writes about incontinence, exhaustion, eating habits, aches and pains…all the things I, too, grapple with on the daily. The way she portrays the reality of edging deeper into your early 40s — that cognitive dissonance that occurs when you still feel like an incompetent child even though you’re old enough to have pushed an incompetent child out of your own vagina — is so pitch-perfect.

In this domestic satire, our protagonist retreats from her career and takes on the role of primary caregiver while her husband is away for work five days a week. It takes its toll. She lurks on the edges of the local mommy-and-me activity groups, not feeling that she belongs. She wears the same lounge pants seven days in a row and allows her hair to grow wild and greasy and untamed. She begins to grow a pelt of coarse hair on the back of her neck, to slink around the neighborhood on all fours, to seize small animals in her jaw, to howl at the moon. This poor mother is without a support system, without an outside identity, and in the wake of the anger and resentment that build inside of her, she eventually turns feral. In transforming her protagonist into a wild, raging animal, Yoder taps into a side of the motherhood experience we often turn away from. As someone who struggled with postpartum depression, who buried her anger because — after years of infertility issues — I was supposed to be happy, dammit, I really appreciated Yoder’s take on new motherhood.

This hilarious memoir about pinpointing and eventually achieving your dreams doesn’t pull any punches. In Key’s characteristic, comical way, he lays out the ugly truth — the immense letdown — of what it’s like to finally do or be or have the thing you’ve been wanting your entire life. Sure, it’s not all bad. In fact, it can often be amazing. But it can also definitely be an emotional rollercoaster. I read this book shortly after my own book came out, when I was stranded firmly in the muck of that post-publication malaise. I was floating along in an overwhelming haze of What now??? and, at the very least, Key made it possible to laugh about it all.

Most of the books above really bring the LOLs. I guess I connected to them so hard because I, too, use humor as a coping mechanism. But this memoir of new motherhood after an unplanned pregnancy was more earnest, and I couldn’t help leaning into that. O’Connell is raw and honest and I especially connected to her descriptions of the inherent fear that comes with motherhood, a fear that is all-consuming, no matter how lucky you feel about having kids. As someone who feels continuously constrained by her own anxiety, this mom-specific fear is definitely something I relate to.

tw: rape, sexual violence, sexual harassment

Back when I was giving interviews to promote my own book, a reported memoir on female sexuality, I found myself name-dropping the title of this anthology a lot. In the collection, writers give testimony about how they’ve been touched by rape culture. The title is brilliant in the way it references how so many of the contributors — and so many victims of sexual violence and/or harassment in general — tell themselves that the thing they experienced was not that bad. As someone who writes about sex for a living, often weaving in her own personal stories, I am constantly grappling with the question of whether my story even matters.