Life Stories #7: Jenny Lawson

In this edition of Life Stories, the podcast series where I interview memoir writers about their lives and the art of writing memoir, I chat with Jenny Lawson, also known as “The Bloggess,” about Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. We talked a lot about how the blog has connected her with her readers in very powerful ways, and about how she uses humor to write about painful experiences:

“I’ve always felt like if I don’t laugh at the things that are happening, especially the most tragic things, then they win. There have been very few points in my life when something happened that was so bad that I couldn’t laugh at it… Really, for me, humor has been a life raft. It’s helped me to get through it because whenever I feel like there’s no way that I’m going to be able to get over this, there’s something so freeing and wonderful about writing a joke about something that seemed like this terrible monster that cuts it down to size and makes it something that you can deal with…”

We also talk about how she got into collecting stuffed animals despite all the traumatic taxidermy-related incidents of her youth, and I let the interview run a few minutes longer than usual so she could tell the whole story about the time a PR agency tried to get her interested in a Kardashian wearing panty hose and wound up being embarrassed from one end of the Internet to the other. Good times!

Listen to Life Stories #7: Jenny Lawson (MP3 file); or download the file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click).

3 May 2012 | life stories |