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Disaster Preparedness: A Memoir (2010)

by Heather Havrilesky(Favorite Author)

3.25 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1594487685 (ISBN13: 9781594487682)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Riverhead Hardcover

review 1: I've been loving Heather Havrilesky's journalism on Salon.com (and now the New York Times Magazine) for years. She's a terrific, sensitive writer and also outrageously funny, crude, and dark. Like Cheryl Strayed on psychedelic drugs. (FYI, Havilesky writes an advice column on The Awl that is similar to Strayed's Dear Sugar column, but with more wicked humor and less earnestness. The same sort of intense and wise advice about relationships, though.) I have a huge crush on Havrilesky and her awesomeness right now. Please write more books, Heather.
review 2: I've loved Heather Havrilesky's writing since way-back-when, like, the late 90s when I had a boring computer job and she was working with Terry Colon at Suck.com. The memoir seems to let her stretch a little-... more-most of what she publishes rests on a kind of ironic detachment, but there's none of that here. Complicated affection for a disastrous childhood, plus a clear-eyed evaluation of her own adult life, maybe? The memoir of a mostly-ordinary life is a difficult genre, and kind of overdone, but there's a lovely quality to the language. I wish she hadn't tried so hard to reach for a grand inspirational note at the end, though. (And since everything in my life is, right now, filtered through the lens of being a new parent, I did really appreciate the way she talks about her own husband and children. She's learned she doesn't need the grand adventures her own parents were always reaching for--she and her husband trust each other enough to get through the ordinary adventures of everyday life.) less

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