Mommy Tried to Kill Me: Why it's never too early to start drinking in Paris Kindle Edition

It was nice to read a story about someone else being mentally tortured by their mother. I read the entire book by the glow of my kindle, under the covers so I could giggle at every misstep. Don’t worry; Ms. Soro lived to tell the tale, so it’s okay to laugh at her misery.
I love her ‘if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong’ tales about her life as she jumps from the side of her bedridden mother in France, to her hovel, er, I mean apartment in California. I still haven’t decided whether her sister is friend or foe. I got right into this book because the author and I have the same math skills, and 200 grams really does mean 200 grandmothers. It’s sad that she had to explain that to the rest of you.
I hope someday Ms. Soro will reiterate and explain exactly what she meant by “Horses were my first real boyfriends.” Um, what? The author touches all of our emotions in this novel which reads like a voyage of self-discovery. I’m glad I found this sweet and sour story.
This book is funny, and it’s sad. And then it’s funny again, and then it’s sad. And then it’s funny…well, you get my meaning. Just be warned, you need to empty your bladder before you sit down to read it, because you’ll laugh until you pee. Like when the author says (paraphrasing) after a night of wine drinking she was sure her check liver light was on.
You’ll feel like Dickens little Oliver Twist because when you get to the end you’ll be screaming “Please, Ms. Soro, I want some more…”

The best book that I finished this month is Mommy Tried To Kill Me: Why It's Never Too Early To Start Drinking In Paris by Suzy Soro.

Suzy Soro is my favorite celebrity I've "met" online (she's also the only one who has ever responded to my emails or to tweets in which I mention her). She's hilarious, and I wish she still blogged. When I learned she had a new book out, I bought it immediately.

Suzy and her sister Lindy spent parts of their childhood living in France with their mother, who had gotten divorced from their father after twenty-nine years of marriage, and later married a Frenchman named Jean. But now little Suzy and Lindy are all grown up, and their mother is not running around Paris with Jean (thank God because he's dead). But she has become a lady of elderly or at least older status, who can still pull what Suzy and Lindy call "The French-Face: an eye roll up to the left, an almost imperceptible shake of the head, and a contemptuous, dismissive shrug. I'm a standup comic: I can recognize signs of contempt from space."

So the older lady who can French-Face with the best of them is eighty-nine, refuses to live in the United States so she can be near Suzy and Lindy, she's fallen in her Paris home and she doesn't have one of those buttons to push to say I've fallen and I can't get up (let me clue you in on something: those buttons are worthless because when I worked in a nursing home, we played host to a load of people who had fallen and couldn't get up and they had the button but couldn't remember how to push it or maybe their thumbs got cut off when they fell), so someone scooped her up and took her to the hospital. Suzy and Lindy travel to Paris to see their mother, and Suzy stays on to clean out the apartment her mother has decided to sell and to help darling French-Face Mommy recover.

This book is Suzy's memoir about her stay in Paris, doing the best she can to assist someone who does not want her assistance, and whose every conversation with Suzy "invariable devolves into what I'm doing wrong with my life, like how I never got a real job. And don't have a 401(k). Or at the very least, a husband with a real job and a 401(k)." Suzy also reveals plenty of interesting and unusual family secrets, including stories about her father's numerous wives.

Mommy Tried To Kill Me is poignant and Sorodonic (my combination of Soro and sardonic) by turns. When it gets too sad––as stories about elderly people who are injured and sinking into dementia must do, especially when they pick on the daughter who is doing her utmost to help out while freezing to death in Paris and trying to remember the French that has pretty much absented itself from her brain––you can count on Suzy to come up with a Sorokism (my combination of Soro, which means funny in some language other than French, and some sarcasm): "If parents want to hide something, they should attach it to their keys. They can never find those."

Mommy Tried To Kill Me: Why It's Never Too Early To Start Drinking In Paris earns The Janie Junebug Seal Of Highest Hilarical Tinged By Whimsy And Weirdness Approval.

In “Mommy Tried To Kill me” Suzy Soro takes the reader on a brilliantly dark, witty, and often times poignant virtual tour that includes caring for her ailing mother in France, her life in Hollywood, and her own emotional roller coaster world of standup comedy. She careens around decades of time and space with the same surefire dramatic and sarcastic genius of Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.” Ms. Soro has found a way to deal with the sensitive and painful reality we all have to face when caring for a parent whose health and mind begins to fail. She does so with wit, wisdom, and the perfect balance of humor and self-realization. Each paragraph is chocked full of hilarious and intelligent one-liners that tells you that this is a comedian at the top of her literary game.

I was fortunate to be an early reader of this book and I loved every bit of it.

Let me preface this review with two statements: first, memoir is not my favorite genre; second, I'm a high school English teacher, so I'm a judgmental reader.

Soro's latest book is memoir done right. She broke my heart and made me laugh over and over again, often on the same page. I think to survive being a part of a family often requires armor, and Soro is properly suited in this work. She deftly blends her particular brand of humor with the heartbreak of caring for an aging parent who lives on another continent. The combination of Soro’s “privileged poverty,” some odd health woes, and a highly critical mother could weigh down a memoir (and that’s the true problem with this genre), but Soro’s skill as a comedy writer pairs with her acerbic and somehow simultaneously charming tone to take the reader on a journey with her. We know she suffers, but she doesn’t want us to suffer with her—she wants us to laugh.

Soro is self-effacing without being too earnest, hilarious without being too blunt, and spot on when it comes to family secrets, and her family is absolutely rife with secrets. Note the first two sentences of her book: “I believe women can’t keep a secret because they talk too much. I believe men can because they aren’t listening to you in the first place.” It’s the perfect beginning to a perfectly awful tell pretty well-told. I highly recommend this memoir, readers.