When I started writing She’s Not the Man I Married, I was thinking of Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which made me think about driving up a mountain road in order to see something a ways off, & the way the road curls around the mountain, so that every time you go around a bend you get a slightly different perspective of the thing you’re trying to see.
I think that’s what this book does. I hope so, anyway. That very same aspect of it also makes choosing excerpts to read aloud kind of difficult, as right in the middle of a narrative about one thing I tend to go off on a huge tangent about shoe-buying or faghags or something. It’s thickly layered, in a sense, so that it’s hard to just pull a piece out that doesn’t loose something in the excerpting.
So now that the first review has come up, and the word “repetitive” appeared in it, I can’t say I’m surprised, but I’d argue it wasn’t unnecessary. Ineffective, maybe, but I was doing it for a reason. “Humorous” and “self-deprecating” are much more accurate.