Good Natured Hysteria – Shaken and Stirred with Hilarity and Honesty!
Some of the best laughs I have experienced in the last decade have been with my girlfriends about the absurd things that are happening to our bodies and our minds. We are laughing at the absurdity of it all, and we are laughing with each other. That is how we surmount the inevitable. But there is a genre of post-menopause support books that does just the opposite – the jokes are about self-contempt and the laughter is about humiliation. It is the reader who is being ridiculed, not the circumstance.
So when my friend Amy Ferris told me she was writing a book called MARRYING GEORGE CLOONEY: Confessions from a Midlife Crisis (Seal Press, September 2009), I hoped it wasn’t one of those.
It isn’t. It is very funny, though, and honest and true.
Along with fantasizing about George Clooney (and who doesn’t?), she establishes a mode of good natured hysteria as she copes with insomnia, hot flashes and her ever-expanding and constricting figure. She alternately cherishes and ridicules her loving husband Ken. At the same time she tries to come to grips with her Jewish mother’s newfound love of Jesus Christ, which is directly proportionate to her rapidly progressing dementia. The effort to transcend a fraught mother-daughter relationship (and whose isn’t?) provides a touching and hilarious subplot.
One of her many insights about a midlife crisis is that you know you are in one, “when there are no molehills, only mountains.”
For information about MGC and Amy’s 3:00 A. M. musings on her blog visit: www.marryinggeorgeclooney.com.
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