If you've ever been a proud mother, faithful wife, best friend, loving daughter, Jewish girl in an Irish town or online-dating widow, you'll laugh and cry at Elinor Lipman's collection of "(all too) personal essays," I Can't Complain. If you haven't--say, for example, you're a man--you'll laugh and cry just the same at Lipman's gentle, sardonic humor.
Lipman's comedic riff on her mother's picky eating becomes a loving homage in "Julia's Child." In other essays, she thanks her son, Ben, who "barely minds being publicly exposed," and entertainingly shares tales from his life, including his sex ed class at age 10. Readers share in her joy at his many achievements because eventually we feel like part of the extended Lipman family.
Anecdotes from her public readings, including a list of "Lies to Tell an Author Who is Looking Forlorn, Unloved, Unpurchased," ring true to anyone who has ever endured a folding chair to hear a favorite writer. Best of all, she shares things learned during the research for her novel The View from Penthouse B--also released in the spring of 2013--in the closing essay, "A Fine Nomance." Lipman's protagonist places a personal ad in the New York Review of Books; Lipman joins Match.com. Only an author as big-hearted as Elinor Lipman would write an essay of her experiences for all the world to read. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller, Book Passage, San Francisco