Furiously Happy

Furiously Happy: a Funny book about horrible things by Jenny Lawson

“Furiously Happy” is by a blogger who readily admits that she’s clinically mentally unstable. She writes about her pills and their crazy side-effects and how all her mental and social disorders lead to pretty funny and embarrassing situations. She lets the reader know just how she feels about anything and everything that comes into her mind without any barriers. The author doesn’t really dwell on the illnesses she has, so if you’re looking for a book about depression or social anxiety, that’s not what this book is about. The subjects are ever-present though.

A reader might think that the book will be depressing, or at the very least bittersweet, but in fact Jenny Lawson is lough-out-loud funny most of the time. The title itself is about choosing to be furiously happy even when everything is awful around you.

The book is kind of a mess though, with no overall theme or anything. Each section is mostly the musings of the author on certain topics or situations she’s been in. There are lots of parts where she tells about her *very* interesting adventures where she (and the reader) can’t help but wonder if it’s actually everyone else who is crazy, because surely the amount of experiences that the author has had can’t all be attributed to her own mental state. Except the stuff about taxidermy – that is ALL her own thing.

One of the longer sections in the book is about the author’s trip to Australia with her best friend. That story and all of its facets were the highlight of the book for me. I was laughing at the scenes described, which include dressing like a kangaroo while chasing actual kangaroos, and wondering if it was noticed by the hotel staff that the carpet design in their room looks like a giant blood smear that leads toward the window (there are pictures).

The rest of the book, however, was a little lackluster for me. There are dozens and dozens of chapters, and they were funny. They were just all over the place. It felt like I was reading disjointed blog posts that just kept on coming. There was also a ton of strong language. Sometimes the strong words made the point funnier, but most of the time I felt like it was just excessive.

If you’re a fan of non-fiction humor, and enjoy episodic and standalone humorous chapters, you may enjoy this book. I did enjoy parts of it, but I would not re-read it in its entirety. In fact, there are only a couple chapters that I would potentially go back to at all.