Customer Reviews

Aunt Erma's Cope Book

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Erma Bombeck is on a quest to perfect herself in this book. As she searches for the greatsest self-help book she can find, she searches to become more sexy, smarter, thinner, and all together more perfect. I don't know if she reaches her goal, but she does decide to like herself anyway! This book is hilarious! "I don't want to participate in any sport that has an ambulance at the bottom of the hill". Enjoy this wonderful, humorous book . . . and take a second look on what it means to be happy!

Erma Bombeck chronicles a year in the 80s when she devoted her time and energy to self-help books, like the "Total Woman."

A reader both feels sympathy for Erma's somewhat bumbling attempts to become what these books demand of her, and for her harried husband, who must have woken up every morning to wonder who his wife is today. She is pressed by an apparently lunatic friend to read "The Sub-Total Woman", attempting to act sexy and wifely to save her marriage, but only ends up weirding out her husband and burning up her nightgown.

Other chapters involve Transcendental Meditation, thrift, the guests from hell, astrology guilt, other people's middle-aged pregnancies, jogging, and the ultimate frontier: satisfaction. You'll want to jeer at the bizarre ladies at the end of this, but you definitely won't regret buying it.

This is my favorite from the queen of family humor. Here's what hilarity happens when the ordinary human tries on psychology fads as if they were dresses on a bargain rack.

Erma Bombeck displays her usual amusing take on being a woman in the 70's. She's undertaken a journey to find herself with the help of self-help books, many of which are very thinly veiled satires of actual tomes from the late 70's. While hilarious and well-written, and like a lot written during this era, this book emphasizes and humorizes the role of a wife, mother, employee, and feminist.
Probably best when read in the 1970's, although I wasn't there, so I couldn't say. I had the feeling that a lot of this was just sailing right over my head. Still enjoyed reading it, though, which says a lot.