Humor writer Jenny Lawson, aka the Bloggess, is wildly popular for sharing wacky, unfiltered stories about her life and struggles with illnesses both physical and mental. Her third collection, with some three dozen essays, arriving after 2015's Furiously Happy, puts that bluntness right in the title: Broken (in the Best Possible Way).
Her work is captivating because Lawson is imperfect. As she writes in the introduction, "who wants to see that level of fraud" where people present only neat, shiny lives? Readers embrace her books because they "want to know we're not alone in our terribleness." Nowhere is this more evident than in the most hilarious chapter, titled "Awkwarding Brings Us Together." It starts with Lawson saying she tweeted about an airport cashier wishing her a safe flight and Lawson replying, "You too!" What followed was an avalanche of tweets from people sharing their own misadventures in societal interactions. Lawson devotes an entire chapter to the highlights, which are impossible to read without howling with laughter.
But Broken isn't just about the funny. It's incredibly moving when she shares details about being submerged in the deep end of depression and writing notes to remind herself the dark days will pass. She also pens an open letter to the health insurance industry, excoriating it for illogically refusing to cover treatments and medication that would help her and similar sufferers heal. And in the chapter where she mentions kintsugi, the Japanese art of fixing broken items with gold-laced lacquer to enhance the cracks, it becomes a perfect description of her writing: showing the damage makes the stories more, not less, beautiful. --Elyse Dinh-McCrillis, blogger at Pop Culture Nerd