I’ve had to stop running for awhile, so I finished up this audio book while cleaning my apartment last weekend (ah, the miracle of those noise-canceling ear buds).

I’m a fan of Kathy Griffin. I think she has a different way of making people laugh, is shameless in a way that doesn’t make me cringe as much as, say, your average episode of “The Office,” and (despite some of her jokes) seems like a genuinely nice and caring person. I picked this audio book because I figured hearing her tell these stories would probably be more entertaining than reading them.

I was right.

She is such a natural storyteller that I didn’t really ever feel like she was READING to me. I’m wondering how much was faithful to the written book and how much was changed for the audio version; she’d stutter, get lost mid-thought and switch gears (in a non-annoying way) and just generally sounded like someone I know sharing a story, not an author or comedian reading from their memoir. That was nice.

If you aren’t familiar with her work, Kathy Griffin started out as a comedian and actress, doing bit parts (including a memorable appearance on Seinfeld) until she was cast as the sidekick in ‘Suddenly Susan’, the Brooke Shield sitcom. Griffin is very up front about her understanding of her skills – she’s not a traditional comedian (she doesn’t excel at 10-minute stand-up spots relying on the set-up and punch line), and she was never going to be the ingénue in a blockbuster film. What she can do is be a funny sidekick, and tell some killer stories. If you’ve ever seen her live (I did, back in NYC), hopefully you know that she’s this high-energy person who can spend 20 minutes telling a story that is funny the whole way through but doesn’t rely necessarily on one big HA moment. I like that kind of comedy, but I realize it isn’t for everyone.

This memoir is really a memoir, not just a collection of some essays that tell her story. It really differs from other comedian memoirs (like “Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?”) in that it has some pretty dark moments. It’s a bit like “Bedwetter” in that aspect. For example, Griffin talks about one of her brothers, who she suspected of being a child molester.

You read that right. A child molester. And she deals with that in like the second chapter, so you know that this isn’t just going to be about some hard-scrabble times at The Comedy Store.

But there are those stories, too. Griffin’s exploration of how she found her place in the comedy world by setting up comedy nights with her friends that focused on storytelling and not repeating material is really interesting, as is her struggle with parlaying her success on “Suddenly Susan” into her own series (“My Life on the D List”). She talks about being repeatedly banned from talk shows, the Dakota Fanning awards show ‘incident’, and the suicide of a colleague. It’s not all laugh-out-loud funny but it’s all really interesting.

She also talks about her marriage, and what lead to it ending. It’s a fascinating section of the book that really had me riveted and annoyed when I had to turn it off because I’d gotten to work.

This is a good book. I probably won’t listen to it again, but if it’s possible to lend audio books then I’ll definitely be offering it up to friends.

I have to say I feel so weird reviewing such an honest and open book. I feel like if I criticize anything, or don’t have the reactions most people have, that I’m judging the author’s feelings instead of her writing or storytelling. But I’m just going to try to set that aside.

I can’t tell if I didn’t like this book because I listened to the audio version or because it just wasn’t a great book. Possibly it was a combination of both, but I’m feeling a little generous and so will blame most of it on the audio version.

As previously mentioned, I have a job some find odd. Because of that work I have spent some time trying to better understand grief. When I’m writing plans for how to best help people experience an unexpected loss, I want to know as much as I can to avoid increasing their pain. I’ve repeatedly heard and seen that there is no ‘right’ way to grieve, and that while nothing that is said is going to make the person feel as they did before their loss, there are certainly things people can say that actively do not help.  When I heard about this book, I thought it would be interesting to get an individual’s perspective on their own grief, especially an individual who is an eloquent writer.

O’Rourke’s mother died after a battle with cancer, and clearly it has affected the author greatly. None of my friends have lost a parent while I’ve known them (a few have lost parents prior to me meeting them), so I’ve not witnessed the grief of a loss of a parent at such a young age first hand (the author was younger than I am now when her mother died, and her mother was in her mid-50s when she died).

O’Rourke did a lot of interesting research to support the book. It is part personal memoir, and part exploration of other explorations of grief, if that makes sense.  She details her experience with her mother’s illness, the changes in her mother’s life, and in her own life, while dealing with the reality of a terminal illness. It was refreshing to hear a perspective that involved not just the direct experience with the dying by the attempts to manage one’s personal life. The author experiences different intimate relationships during her mother’s illness and immediately following it, and she describes them in a way that helps provide some insight into her daily life that isn’t just how she is relating to her father and siblings.

One part that I did really find to be well-done was her tackling of the ‘stages of grief’ idea that is so prevalent in our society. It seems most people don’t know (I only learned this last year) that the stages of grief are actually meant to address the stages people who are dying go through. Not those dealing with the loss of another person, but those dealing with their impending death.

I really do think that I would have found the book more moving and interesting if I had read it and not listened to it. While it was appropriate, the author’s complete monotone voice throughout six hours of reading made it hard to delineate between the happy, the sad, the informative and the funny. She sounded like a bored senior in high school reading a book report. If I had been reading I could have applied the same imagination I apply to other books when I read them, I and I think that would have been preferable.

Thus far I’ve listened to three other books, and all were (mostly) light, comedic books. This one required a bit more brain power and thoughtful processing of the words, and I wasn’t as able to do that when I was on a run or walking home from work. I’ve learned my lesson and will be sticking to the light stuff for my audio books.

This book is great, y’all.

Sorry. I’ve been known to say ‘y’all’ on occasion (who knows why – I grew up on the west coast), and after listening to Ms. Lawson read her hilarious, sweet and bizarre memoir, I’ve incorporated it into my vocabulary once again. I can’t help it.

You might be familiar with Jenny Lawson but not know it. She is better known as The Bloggess, and she is a brilliant writer. She’s open, a fantastic storyteller, and able to make me laugh out loud, tear up, cringe, and feel nostalgic for my own (pretty different from her) childhood. Often in the same chapter.

Lawson grew up poor in West Texas. Like, bread sack shoes poor. Her father was a taxidermist and would do things like stick his hand up a dead squirrel and treat it like a puppet, or bring baby bobcats into the home to hang out. While the subtitle of the book says the memoir is “mostly” true, the reality is that most any chapter struck me as both completely ridiculous and totally plausible. Do I believe that she once had her arm up a cow’s vagina during animal husbandry class? Yes. Do I believe that they had raccoons as pets for a while? Yes.

The stories follow Lawson from childhood through adulthood, into married life. She is a mother, although only a couple of her stories deal directly with her in that role, and one of them is a doozy. In that chapter she talks in great detail about her miscarriages and attempts at having a child. I cannot imagine how devastating that was, but Lawson has such a tremendous way with words that I felt like I was hearing a friend describe it. It had me tearing up and wanting to give her and her husband a big hug.

One thing I really appreciated about this book is that there is a sensitivity that runs throughout it. The stories are mostly hilarious and guffaw-inducing, but there’s a rawness and reality behind them. It is vulnerability and self-reflection and strength all wrapped up together.

A couple of things to keep in mind before you run out to buy the paperback version (on the NY Times bestseller list now! First: There is a ton of cursing in this book. I don’t subscribe to the idea that cursing is offensive or lazy writing. I think the concept of someone saying ‘heck’ when their personality and feelings want them to say ‘fuck’ is ridiculous, unless you’re in church or possibly at work. If the author is thinking ‘fuck’, she should write it down. Clearly, Lawson is often thinking ‘fuck.’ And it works. It makes sense, it isn’t shocking, and it’s a hell of a lot less jarring than someone reacting to something utterly absurd with ‘dagnabbit’ instead of ‘holy shit.’

Second: PLEASE buy the audio version of this book. Lawson has a fantastic voice and amazing comic timing. Her delivery of the stories makes them all the funnier. The audio book also has the bonus chapter that is found in the paperback version, plus a good 10 minutes at the very end which is just her in the sound booth, offering up some fantastic ideas. And saying ‘vagina’ a lot.

This book is staying on my phone for multiple re-listenings, and it is going to get five stars, because it is awesome.

This is the second audiobook I’ve ‘read’ for the Cannonball Read. Sticking with my idea of listening to female comic memoirs read by the authors, I picked The Bedwetter. I chose it with a bit of trepidation, as while I’ve found myself laughing at some of Sarah Silverman’s work, I recalled that she’s said some things that left a bad taste in my mouth. In general I think people are pretty torn on Sarah Silverman. They either find her funny or find her annoying / inappropriate. After listening to this memoir I’m definitely more of a fan of her work.

The book has a very sincere tone to it without being annoying. She sounds like herself, but not like a character version of herself, if that makes sense. Whether it was an act or not, I imagined that this is what she’d sound like talking to her friends. She shares some stories that would clearly be mortifying for a child or teenager, making her quite relatable, and sheds some light onto both the world of making a sitcom-style show and working at Saturday Night Live as a writer.

I think my favorite parts were where she discussed jokes she’s told that were not well received. Probably the best-known instance of this was when she was on Conan O’Brien and made a joke that used a racial slur for Asian people. Many people I know would probably stop listening there, but I was in the middle of a run and so didn’t really have a choice. And by that point I’d also felt like I’d invested enough in the book to want to hear her discussion of it. You know what? It was a very interesting, well-thought out discussion. Yes, she is a comic who make jokes about poo, but she’s also a thoughtful person interested in social commentary.

The audio book is about six hours in length, so just long enough for me to listen to it over about a week’s worth of runs. I’m glad I purchased it instead of borrowing it from the library because it’s the kind of book I could see myself listening to again in the future.

This book was a bit of an experiment for me. I enjoy memoirs and essays from female authors (Ali in Wonderland, Bossypants, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?), and have read them imagining them narrated by the authors themselves, hearing Tina Fey in my mind. I run for exercise, so I figured I’d take on the audiobook option as part of this Cannonball Read and find some fun memoirs to get me through my workouts.

My first purchase (via audible.com) was Samantha Bee’s cleverly titled I Know I Am, But What Are You? In it she chronicles her life, sharing some interesting stories, some funny stories, and some tragically funny stories.

Born to teenage parents, she spent time living with her mother, her dad and stepmom, and her grandmother. As a child she was an introvert, an animal lover, and obsessed with Jesus. Not so much in a religion sort of way, but in an ‘I’m going to wash his feet and marry him” sort of way. That story was easily my favorite of the book, although her treatise on gift-giving and -receiving is a close second.

She definitely has some interesting stories to tell, but I only found myself laughing out loud a couple of times. I’m not sure if that was even her goal. But I think I would have preferred to read this as opposed to listen to her reading of it. She reads it pretty much exactly as she narrates her segments on “The Daily Show,” and while that works in four-minute Republican take-downs, it can sometimes be a bit much in book form.

I’d say this would probably be best as a library book or a sale book loaded onto your e-reader for reading on a flight or on vacation.

I want to live abroad someday. I’ve done it before, spending a year in London in 2009-2010. It was interesting, although I had a different perspective than Mr. Baldwin when he wrote Paris, I Love You, But You’re Bringing Me Down. I was in school, wasn’t worried about my visa, and had housing booked before I arrived.

Mr. Baldwin, on the other hand, had to navigate a lot of the new world of being an ex-pat on his own, with minimal assistance from his entertaining (and somewhat broadly written) coworkers. In this memoir of the realities of living in the City of Light, the author shares a seemingly endless (and at times seemingly pointless) stream of somewhat-connected, usually clever, anecdotes about the life he and his wife built when he was working at an advertising agency in Paris. The characters, while ostensibly based on real people, seem straight out of central casting (I have a very vivid picture of who could play the loud, friendly, somewhat useless landlord in the film version).

I can appreciate the idea of a book that doesn’t sugar coat the realities of life abroad. Some days you’re spending an entire afternoon looking at great works of art, eating divine sweets from the most adorable patisserie; the next you’re crying because you don’t know where to go to buy printer paper. Mr. Baldwin does an excellent job of painting a vivid picture that is not highly romanticized (a difficult task, since we’re talking about PARIS), but the book left me wanting more. There was a thread, loosely tying the numerous anecdotes together: he’s writing a novel while his wife is also pursuing her own creative work. But it felt disjointed, as though the author kept a journal, realized he has a few good comments to make and tried to turn it into a book.

That’s not to say it wasn’t enjoyable to read; I definitely found myself laughing out loud a few times. And he clearly has a gift for language, which makes me think that I’d really enjoy his novel You Lost Me There, the writing of which he also chronicles during his Paris stay. I just felt that this particular book wasn’t fully formed when it went to the publisher.

If you have aspirations to live abroad, it can’t hurt to check this book out. It’s good to have a little reality with the dreams of spending lazy weekends on the banks of the Seine, reading Sartre and contemplating the future of democracy while drinking actual champagne. It’s also not bad for a little light reading even if you aren’t interested in trading in your house for a visa any time soon.