Silicon Valley Moms Group Book Club: "Much to Your Chagrin" by Suzanne Guillette
Picking up this book, I found the subtitle "A Memoir of Embarrassment" intriguing. After all, aren't we all a little bit nosy by nature, rubbernecking at car accidents, gawking at the screaming child in the grocery store? Truth be told, I am not often one of those people standing by the sidelines; I find myself becoming too embarrassed for the person. I remember once watching a Superbowl in which the outcome depended on a kicker's kick, and he missed. I'm still not over it. Were that my son, I'd probably have needed a lot of therapy.
So when given the opportunity to reflect on my own embarrassment, I dug deep, but I came up with little. While Suzanne Guillette appears comfortable sharing tales of crapping her pants in her friend's car, I can't go there (not that I've ever done that, anyway). And that "crap" theme in the book just keeps coming back. I kept thinking, these are not children! Doesn't anybody have an embarrassing story that doesn't involve bodily fluids? Not so much, it appears.
Ms. Guillette suggests that folks who don't have tales of embarrassment to tell are probably lying, and she may be right. Since I believe that there is such a thing as TMI, I'm not going to spill my guts here. But my favorite embarrassing moment that I ever witnessed was in junior high school, when my BFF went down a super-steep water slide at a crowded park and arrived at the bottom with her two-piece swimsuit in tatters -- the bottom half clear up her behind and the top half rolled up and exposing her hooters. Can you imagine the pre-teen horror?!
Sadly, I'm sure I'll have many embarrassing moments to come, especially as my daughter is already pre-pubescent, and the very act of my waking up and existing seems to embarrass her on some "off" days. And that is why I blog... to share those moments with the world. If I have to suffer through puberty yet again, then, darn it, y'all are going to suffer with me.
In closing, I always add a note for these book clubs on whether or not I'd recommend this book. The answer is: sure, especially for a light summer read. The tone in which it's told (it's all in the second person "you") bugged me a bit, but you get over that after a few chapters. And yes, as some critics suggests, it's a bit ego-centric -- but, after all, it is this writer's journey of discovering more and more embarrassing tales in her own life as she's writing the stories of others', so there is room for ego in this book. At the end of the day, I appreciate any read that makes me reflect on the ways I've lived (and am living) my own life -- and this one hit a soft spot for me, as, like the author, I entered my 30s in the same neighborhood of New York City, also as a graduate student, though commuting with the bridge-and-tunnel crowd. I dug especially deep in those years for an embarrassing story but instead came up with so many happy memories of my time in the Ivory Tower, especially as I'm deploying the skills I learned there daily in fighting some local math wars at present. And now, back to that...
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