Procure Welcome To My Planet: Where English Is Sometimes Spoken Scripted By Shannon Olson Distributed As Softcover

me forever to finish, but I just couldn't quite quit, This character is pretty frustrating, but still hilarious at times, I'm not sure if we are supposed to blame all her problems on her mother, but mom seemed pretty interesting to me, There's not a lot of plot or story arc, it's more just a long conversation with the therapist, and hoping the character comes out a little smarter at the end, than when she started.
This doesn't sound like a very favorable review, but I still kinda liked the book, This is one of the few books that I've ever picked up and readpages which is a lot for me without even noticing, I like Olson's dry humor, and it's satisfying when someone's own experiences or views on life mirror your own,

My only real

problem with the book came as I got closer to the end and realized that Olson is kind of a whiny schmuck.
Her anecdotes about the troubles of living with her parents and her inability to pay her bills on time were cute and funny at first, but they ended up being a little irritating.
Why is it so difficult for a talentedyearold to stop acting like she's still in high school

The book was still a fun read for the most part, and the short chapters were a huge plus for easily distracted people such as myself.


Favorite quotes:

"'Your father,' says Flo, 'always felt that tomorrow would be better, Tomorrow would be a better day, That everything he couldn't be and do today would magically happen tomorrow, The thing he has never understood,' she says, 'is that you have to make those changes, you have to take steps to change things, or the next day will be the same,' she says, 'with all the weight of the day before on top of it.
'"

"Today, maybe because it's gray again it's been a gray year or maybe because I've watched 'Father of the Bride' the night before my sister has already rented it to get ideas all I can think about is that marriage and television and homeownership are inextricably linked and created to dull us into complacency.
" I cant tell you how many times I read this book back inthrough like, I was so sure my college years and beyond would mimic Olsons, They didnt, but I still absolutely love the seeminglyconfessional style of her writing, I was first leery of this book, fearing it may be simply chick lit, But I gave it the college try and was really pleased, Shannon Olson writes well. Her semifictional quirky character of the same name as the author has boyfriend problems, a bleak future and an overbearing mother who sends her newspaper clippings about health, finance and other items.
The book is funny, but is also deep and poignant, I enjoyed it tremedously. A good surprise. my s/o sent me this book by mail, saying it was his favorite, and it really helped me understand him better : Honestly, the marketing folks didn't do this book any favors by giving it a chicklit cover.
. .

In reality, it's far smarter and funnier than that, and it doesn't have a chicklit story arc, Clearly a case of the publisher looking for a way to fit the book into a certain segment and failing,

Olson's is a very witty book about a lates woman who moves home to her parents' house for a while and later goes to grad school, all as part of finding her place in the world.
Granted, it sounds like a muchtraversed road, but her spoton descriptions of dialogue between her and her mother make it especially worth it,

It's recommended by Garrison Keillor, too, for what it's worth,

This book was not what I expected it to be, because I just can't stop myself from judging books by their covers, The illustration reminded me of an earlys webcomic, which made me think I was in for a lighthearted, zany romp with a spunky protagonist who would be making wry observations, and the descriptive blurb on the back seemed to corroborate this impression.
The book was actually much sadder, I didn't think it was particularly funny, Maybe funny in a gallows humor kind of way, but definitely not laughoutloud funny, Also, the cartoon on the front seems totally unrelated to the content is she eating cookies There are not really any cookies in this book,

Despite my expectations being subverted, I did like the book just fine, The narrator is a woman about my age who clearly has ADHD, though in the yearshe wouldn't have been diagnosed with it, She is also clearly suffering from posttraumatic stress after being sexually assaulted multiple times by her first boyfriend at the beginning of the book, though I don't recall the word "rape" being used a single time, because in the yearmost people would not have considered the incidents to count as rape.
And then there are the problems she has that are actually mentioned on the cover she has unhealthy enmeshment with her mother, she can't manage her debt, and she doesn't know what to do with her life.
She is a girl with a lot of problems, and mostly what she does is goof off, make the same mistakes over and over, and hyperfixate on her mother's happiness.


Time moves strangely in this book, Because so much of it is recounting daytoday minutiae, it is a bit jarring when there are sudden jumps forward in the timeline, or when we are catching up with things that have happened in the past.
But I think this is a bit clever, because it recreates what it is like to actually live life, We cannot see our lives spread out in their entirety before us we live through individual days, our brains process the vast amount of information we receive and then decide what information to keep, and what we hold onto is what eventually gets worked into the overarching narrative.
Later on we can see patterns and we run through the memories again, And while we spend each individual day going to work, going to the bank, flipping through TV channels and whatever else, eventually that time adds up and we find that six months, twelve months, five years have passed.


The reason I am not giving five is that while I think this is a clever narrative flow, it can be boring to read about a woman going on about her mother and neighbors and boyfriends for pages on end.
Having the woman's therapist repeatedly point out her fixation with others does not actually spare the reader from the experience of reading it all,

But even so, I would still like to direct the narrator's therapist to this Didion quote:

How it felt to me: that is getting closer to the truth about a notebook.
I sometimes delude myself about why I keep a notebook, imagine that some thrifty virtue derives from preserving everything observed, See enough and write it down, I tell myself, and then some morning when the world seems drained of wonder, some day when I am only going through the motions of doing what I am supposed to do, which is write on that bankrupt morning I will simply open my notebook and there it will all be, a forgotten account with accumulated interest, paid passage back to the world out there: dialogue overheard in hotels and elevators and at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon one middleaged man shows his hat check to another and says, “Thats my old football number” impressions of Bettina Aptheker and Benjamin Sonnenberg and Teddy “Mr.
Acapulco” Stauffer careful aperçus about tennis bums and failed fashion models and Greek shipping heiresses, one of whom taught me a significant lesson a lesson I could have learned from F.
Scott Fitzgerald, but perhaps we all must meet the very rich for ourselves by asking, when I arrived to interview her in her orchidfilled sitting room on the second day of a paralyzing New York blizzard, whether it was snowing outside.


I imagine, in other words, that the notebook is about other people, But of course it is not, I have no real business with what one stranger said to another at the hatcheck counter in Pavillon in fact I suspect that the line “Thats my old football number” touched not my own imagination at all, but merely some memory of something once read, probably “The EightyYard Run.
” Nor is my concern with a woman in a dirty crepedeChine wrapper in a Wilmington bar, My stake is always, of course, in the unmentioned girl in the plaid silk dress, Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point,