Citizen Reader

It has been an awesome week for memoirs here at CitizenReader Central.

I only brought The Late Bloomer's Revolution: A Memoir home because I loved the title*.  I am more than familiar with the idea of blooming late.  I was about eight through all of high school, turned ten in college, and I'm still rather waiting to become an adult.  I am always at least a decade behind my peers, and I've made my peace with that.  That means I'll live longer, right?  (Yeah, still waiting to bloom into some math skills, too.)

But the book.  By Amy Cohen.  There's nothing earth-shattering here; it is, in fact, another memoir by a single New York City woman in her thirties, out there looking for love.  Because she also works as a dating correspondent for the cable show New York Central, she's also looking for love in all the wrong places, especially considering she hates bars (she is REALLY a girl after my own heart).  Throughout the course of her narrative she moves from her early thirties to her late thirties, experiences a horrible and long-term rash on her face (which sounds trivial, but as anyone who has ever waited for a rash to clear up anywhere, much less on your face, much less when you're trying to look your best and "meet people," will tell you is no small deal), works through various relationships, and has some truly hilarious conversations with her parents and family.

I'm making it sound so small.  But it is a beautiful, big-hearted, story, and very well-written, which I always appreciate in a memoir.  It took me a couple of chapters to truly get into it, but when I did, I wished I could invite Cohen over for a drink and some snacks; I not only liked her book, I liked her.  Loved, really.  How can you not love a woman who admits: "Now, I was quickly approaching the age where, when I did decide to have children, I might need the kind of fertility drugs that could cause you to bear so many children at once that it seemed appropriate to give birth in a cardboard box under the bed and then lick them clean" (p. 157)?

And I loved the ending.  I'm not going to give it away but it made me very, very, happy, primarily because Cohen sounds like she was happy when she wrote it.  You'll just have to read it to find out.

*After I got it home I saw the blurb on the back by Melissa Bank, which got me all excited.  Bank's one of my favorite novelists of all time (and also very beautiful and funny in person).