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satsumabug's review
4.0
I have a feeling this book would be funny anyway, but if you know Los Angeles, it is really hilarious.
dcmr's review
3.0
Sharp and funny. An easy read about a neurotic writer. This was good, but her newer work, "The Madwoman in the Volvo" is much better and tighter.
left_coast_justin's review
3.0
When my kids were little, I used to try and take them to at least one live stage performance per year, and lazy bum that I am, this usually ended up being a holiday treat because I'd realize we were halfway through December and I hadn't yet fulfilled my annual obligation.
One year, what was passing through town was Sandra Tsing Loh's one-woman holiday show. It didn't completely knock my socks off, but it was fun enough, and somehow or other I learned that she was also an author. I read a bit about her and felt her to be a kindred spirit, trained in physics but much more interested in the arts, so I went and found this book in the library.
It's hard to write humor, and I think she did a good job here. (Note: This came out during the middle of the Year in Provence craze, and is clearly riffing off that.) I did laugh out loud, once, at a description of trying to get jiggy with a potential lover in a car that smelled like French Fries. Of course it did. The guy was married and had kids, and the smell in his car tipped her off. Otherwise, the book was pleasant enough to read, about the neurotic author's many inferiority complexes, the inevitable byproducts, she claimed, of having a stern German mother and inflexible Chinese father.
All of this has a sad ending. Several years later, I remember reading in shocked disbelief while reading an essay about the end of her marriage, which, in her mind, meant an end to the institution altogether. It appeared to me that she had lost her mind, hopefully temporarily, as a result of the great stress attending a divorce. But for me, it was like having a little candle blown out in my life. Sigh.
One year, what was passing through town was Sandra Tsing Loh's one-woman holiday show. It didn't completely knock my socks off, but it was fun enough, and somehow or other I learned that she was also an author. I read a bit about her and felt her to be a kindred spirit, trained in physics but much more interested in the arts, so I went and found this book in the library.
It's hard to write humor, and I think she did a good job here. (Note: This came out during the middle of the Year in Provence craze, and is clearly riffing off that.) I did laugh out loud, once, at a description of trying to get jiggy with a potential lover in a car that smelled like French Fries. Of course it did. The guy was married and had kids, and the smell in his car tipped her off. Otherwise, the book was pleasant enough to read, about the neurotic author's many inferiority complexes, the inevitable byproducts, she claimed, of having a stern German mother and inflexible Chinese father.
All of this has a sad ending. Several years later, I remember reading in shocked disbelief while reading an essay about the end of her marriage, which, in her mind, meant an end to the institution altogether. It appeared to me that she had lost her mind, hopefully temporarily, as a result of the great stress attending a divorce. But for me, it was like having a little candle blown out in my life. Sigh.