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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
I'm So Glad She Felt That Way, or Turning Memoir On Its Head, March 19, 2009
Diana Joseph's I'm Sorry You Feel That Way is my new Favorite Book. By that, I mean Favorite Ever, the kind I talk about incessantly, whip out and read aloud, buy for my friends and family and generally insist everyone I know stop everything they're doing and read now (the last one was Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle).
Lest you think that's hyperbolic, let me tell you when this book is so amazing. Firstly, I read a lot of memoirs, and even the most compelling ones can take on a certain sameness: I did this, I went through tragedy, I did this. Not to knock the genre, because I gravitate towards it, but what Joseph's done here is to turn the memoir on its head. On the surface, these are character studies of the men in her life, and as character studies, they should themselves be studied by fiction writers for their fine detail, their knack of getting inside her subjects' heads, whether it's her ex-husband, son, Satanist neighbor, or dog.
But then Joseph manages to bring the topic at hand back to herself in ways that are subtle yet extremely powerful. She talks about what these men (and animals) mean to her, how she is like them and different from them, what she gets out of her relationships with them, the complexity of the love she feels for them. In the process, she touches on sex, religion, family, motherhood, daughterhood, smoking, work, and pet ownership.
My favorite chapter by far is "The Girl Who Only Sometimes Said No," about looking at her son's yearbook with him, and trying to grapple with her own past as a slut (or perhaps a "slut") while conveying to him why judging women on their sexuality is wrong. Her writing is blunt, direct, and powerful. The scant few sentences about her being date raped are ones that linger in their scarcity.
I skipped around these essays, which Joseph makes it easy to do. Together, they cohere and make a narrative of a woman who got married and became a mom in her early twenties, was miserable and lonely and often lost-feeling, drank a lot, but got her bearings (her essay about her former colleague and how his alcoholism separated them is moving in its calm tragicness) and became a professor. I left the essay "Humping the Dinosaur" for last; I started it, but since I'm not a dog person and I thought it was about her dog (which it is), I kept putting it off. When I finally got to it, it contained a paragraph about crying, about losing it, about worrying incessantly, that was as honest and true and easily relateable as the rest of the book. That's the magic here; a chapter on her dog's humping problem is also about how she copes with stress.
By taking the winding road to tell her stories, Joseph makes us pause and truly look at the people she trains her pen on. Her compassion for them, her insight into what makes them tick, and why she's drawn to them, is at the heart of this book. Please do yourself a favor and check out I'm Sorry You Feel That Way. I have a feeling it just may become your new favorite book too.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
I'm Sorry You Feel That Way, May 18, 2009
is the catchy title of Diana Joseph's book of essays about her life. Subtitled The Astonishing But True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog, Joseph recounts incidents from her life that made her the woman she is.
The book is an honest, funny and touching look at Diana's life. Her father, a man who preferred to be sans shirt most of the time, gave his twelve-year-old daughter some advice on boys: "Don't be a pig". Translation: Don't be a slut. She didn't take his advice, and frequently her choices in men were questionable.
She calls her now-teenage son 'the boy', and her description of raising a son mostly on her own reminded me of Anne LaMott's writing on the same topic. Single moms trying everyday to do their best, but struggling with not having enough money, exhaustion, depression and loneliness. She is not a matryr, just a human being.
Joseph is remarkably honest in her assessment of herself and others, and that is the strength of her book. She has the ability to see the good and bad that exists in all of us, and expresses that in her unique way.
The last essay of the book, 'Ten Million, At Least', is the most moving. Joseph lives with literature professor Al, a good guy who loves her and her boy. They love each other, but they also have their differences, which makes it difficult at times to cohabitate. If you don't tear up at the last two pages, you simply aren't human.
Diana Joseph has spent much of her life around men- her dad, her brothers, lovers, and her son- and that has colored the way she sees the world. Her book is an honest look at how a modern woman deals with bad habits, depression, sex, love, crummy jobs, poverty, pets, loneliness, rock and roll and family. It's humorous and moving, just like life. If you are a fan of David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, add Diana Joseph to your reading list.
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9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
You Won't Be Sorry, March 5, 2009
Let's get down to brass tax...Diana Joseph's I'm Sorry You Feel That Way is a damn fine book.
Excuse my lack of eloquence in my praise, I'm no Richard Ford (have you read that blurb? Goodness!), but this book has the grit, charm, humor and heart you want from any book. And it's those qualities, particularly the blue-collar aspects, that set this apart from other essay collections.
The essay collections I've read always seem outside the realm of my world. As good a writer as David Sedaris is, it's impossible for me to identify with him over his problems of living in a cottage in France, or traveling to Japan to quit smoking. And because he's the vanguard of essayists, it gives the whole essay genre an air of privilege, or a kind of cultural superiority. I'm Sorry You Feel That Way is rooted in a much more real, Roseanne Barr, middle-class America world. And I'm thankful for it. This grit contributes to that felt trueness that lurks in all of these essays, like the best Bruce Springsteen songs, that I'm sure Joseph knows the lyrics to.
These essays on the men of Diana Joseph, from her trench-footed son, to the lumberjack ex-husband, to her obscene brother, to God on high, all are so honest and heartfelt, you just want to give Diana a hug afterwards and say, "I know exactly what you mean." And I don't have brothers, or an ex-husband, or a teenage son, or much of a sexual history. This speaks to the authority, beauty and power of these essays.
Essentially, this crosses boundaries of typical "audience" issues. If you think of a book like Sloane Crosley's I Thought There'd Be Cake. There you have cutesy stories aimed at urbane women with an extra 12 dollars in their pocket, and that book never delivers above that to anything of any actual depth or meaning. I'm Sorry You Feel That Way goes so far beyond surface level concerns of the modern, educated woman that anyone from the woman-hatingest Philip Roth character to the stereotypical Oprah zealot, will feel the emotional resonance at work here.
But, even if you want to quibble with my position that as an essay collection this finally offers something different and substantive to the genre...the book is still hilarious. I don't want to spoil any of those parts for you, but I'll say this...the dog essay. I'd like to see Cesar Milan try that on one of his pooches.
The only knock I can think of against this collection is Joseph's list-like style, and penchant for whole names. It adds an interesting rhythm at times, but other times it feels a bit forced, and I wondered at its function. Kind of like a hood ornament on an expensive car. Yeah, it looks nice, but the car is a Mercedes already, so is it really necessary? But that also speaks to the strength of the essays...I mean, after all, if you're only complaining about the hood ornament, then you got yourself one fine machine.
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