All Grown Up <<<your link to buy. Why can’t I DOOOOO this like everybody else???

Book of the Month finally got one right.

So I loved this. It’s written in a conversational tone and you feel ~or I did, anyway~ like you’re having mimosas at brunch on Sunday with one of your single girlfriends. It’s refreshing in a way that it makes you feel okay to be in your thirties and not have your shit together. Usually chick lit is about girls in their twenties that don’t have their poop in a group and that’s okay~nobody expects them to. They only ask that you remain bright and opinionated and slightly slutty.
In your thirties you get to be mad about it.

“Her life is architected, elegant and angular, a beauty to behold, and mine is a stew, a juicy, sloppy mess of ingredients and feelings and emotions, too much salt and spice, too much anxiety, always a little dribbling down the front of my shirt. But have you tasted it? Have you tasted it. It’s delicious.” That’s me. That’s SO ME.
{I changed my rating to five stars but wanted to include this. It deserved five, just because fours are seen as So. Much. Less. It’s not fair} It’s kinda written in short story form, which may have been how it started out, like a piece at a time for magazines, which works, but it felt almost condescending as she related how her father died a half dozen times throughout. It’s not something easily forgotten. Or how her mom went to stay with her brother. That was slightly irritating.
I would say don’t read this book if you’re looking for a deeper meaning, but you can find it if you choose to do so. I’m guilty of gliding along on the surface, enjoying books at their face value, but when someone points out the obvious parallelism, I’m like, “Oh yeah. So that was the point of that storyline.” Then I feel stupid. Which is why I was reluctant to join a book club. And why I don’t contribute to discussions on here. Leave me to point out the obvious with some bland, “I liked it!”.
There are no resolutions in this book either, but I don’t look for a sequel. That’s kind of the point with these drifting, loose end books.
She feels about art the way I feel about the written word. We are both failures at our true loves, Andrea and I. I get it: “I go to an art opening with Nina after work. I don’t stay long, because it is one of those days where it is hard for me to look at art. Sometimes it is hard for me to look at art because so much art is terrible and I can tell it is a lie, that the artist is lying, and I begin to hate that art/artist for wasting my time.”
This author ain’t lyin’. She ain’t makin’ it pretty, either. And I love her for it.