Looking for a Literary Laugh? Start Here.
Show me someone who wakes up each morning during an unprecedented global crisis by jumping out of bed and declaring excitement for the state of the world, and I’ll show you a liar. We’re all feeling scared and tenuous – is that person too close to me? Is that person offended that I’m seven feet from them, and not six? The list of things that we never thought we’d have to worry about goes on; and there is no indication as to when – or IF - life will resume to normal. So, while we could all while away our free hours wondering whether we’ll be eating in 100-seat restaurants with five other people all wearing masks for the rest of time, for someone like me, with generalized anxiety (and since many of us have that, more on assuaging it in a later post), it’s not particularly productive. When I’m stressed, I like to read books that make me feel better. And books that make me feel better generally also make me laugh and, in certain cases, put my own (fantastic) life into perspective. The three books below are some of my all-time favorites, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Fleishman is in Trouble, Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Many of you may be unwittingly familiar with Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the handsomely compensated and highly talented journalist behind many an iconic celebrity profile (Gwyneth Paltrow in the New York Times ring a bell?). My roommate and I are both big fans, so, last spring, when she told me Taffy had written a book and she’d devoured it in a matter of hours, I’m not sure why I didn’t pick it up immediately. But I didn’t, and it wasn’t until the fall that I decided to see what the hype was about.
Fleishman is in Trouble follows Toby Fleishman, a balding, middle-aged New York doctor in the midst of a trial separation from his wife, Rachel, a high-powered talent agent specializing in Broadway stars at the helm of her own agency. Toby, single for the first time in two decades, is enjoying his time perusing the seemingly bottomless pit of the dating app world, where he can use old, handsome pictures to obscure his dimunitive height and pretend he is not, in fact, middle-aged and balding. One weekend, when Rachel is meant to pick up the kids and Toby has arranged for one of his Tinder flings to stop by, she simply never comes. Not only that, but she is unreachable via every technological medium; even her long-suffering assistant struggles has no idea where she is. Toby Fleishman, my friends? He is in trouble.
The book doesn’t sound nearly as funny as it actually is; a skewering critique of the Upper East Side social scene, featuring moms in slogan shirts touting ridiculous phrases like “Beets Don’t Kale My Vibe” and Pilates class rivalries. You will be hooked until the very end.
Queenie, Candice Carty-Williams
I am OBSESSED with this book, as many of my friends know. I listened to an author special with Candice Carty-Williams on The High Low, my favorite podcast, last year, during which she read an excerpt from her book, and was laughing out loud. I ordered it immediately and read it throughout the duration of a single plane ride. The very first sentence of the book jacket tells you all you really need to know: “Queenie is in a spiral.”
Queenie is living in London, fresh off a blindsiding breakup from her solid but boring boyfriend of four years, working in a decent but highly unmotivating job. The book isn’t highly plot-driven, it simply follows the slow but steady unraveling of Queenie’s life from the moment of the breakup. I know, this book doesn’t sound remotely funny. And, frankly, parts of it are depressing. But it’s also a realistic portrayal of mid-twenties life, interspersed with dialogue [Queenie’s incredibly religious Jamaican aunt being my personal favorite character] that will make you laugh out loud. Queenie is one of those books that might masquerade as a “romantic comedy,” but is actually a highly important story of a girl straddling two worlds, neither of which she feels like fully fits her, and attempting to figure out her place in society and the world with humor and grace.
Trivial Pursuits, Raven Smith
Raven Smith, another author that my roommate, Caroline, brought to my attention, is a goddamn genius. He is my platonic ideal of a culture critic. He is not delivering dry reviews of the latest books, movies, or Broadway shows with sentences clearly spoon-fed by their PR departments. Smith is subversive and creative. A quick Google search for one of his British Vogue columns starts as follows: “As mascara Niagaras down your face into your Pret jambon-beurre you may have noticed the heatwave sweeping across Britain…I nipped for milk without my Hazmat suit and burnt all the way to my organs, the interior of my lungs redecorated with charcoal like a bad episode of Changing Rooms.”
Not many people can turn a heatwave into an entire column (in which he waxes poetic about his dream of “swimming in a lake of icy gazpacho”) but elevating everyday experiences into an opportunity for humorous observation is, indeed, Smith’s forte. Which is why his book, Trivial Pursuits, in which Smith quite literally pursues story arcs surrounding certain minutiaie that fascinate him, is so perfect. There is no detail too small or no issue too thorny to become fodder for a chapter: Smith vacillates effortlessly between discussing IKEA, Gwyneth Paltrow’s goop supplements, and being overserved at weddings (I drank so heavily at a wedding I attempted the magician’s trick of whipping the tablecloth out from under everybody’s glasses. It was unsurprisingly misadventurous, resulting ina completely collapsed table, much spilled Prosecco, and many a drenched Ganni dress) to describing his life with a single mother and an absent father, and his experience as a gay man navigating the world of having a baby. I cannot count the number of times I laughed out loud. You’ll be laughing with Smith and seeing yourself in many of his millennial musings. If David Sedaris, Larry David, and Carrie Bradshaw had a baby…Smith would be it. I think you need to order this one from the UK [I know both Caroline and I did], but it is 100% worth it.
Heartburn, Nora Ephron
There are very few people who aren’t familiar with the brilliant work of Nora Ephron (author of both books and screenplays: When Harry Met Sally or Sleepless in Seattle ringing any bells?), or, at the very least, her name. If you are one of those people; don’t despair, but definitely pick up one of her books immediately. Heartburn is a sliver of an autobiographical novel, one you can spend a blissful afternoon immersed in. It opens with reluctantly DC-based cookbook author Rachel Samstat discovering that her husband is having an affair (with one of her friends who, honestly, is a terrible cook). Rachel is devastated…and seven months pregnant. The book is not-so-loosely based on the dissolution of Ephron’s own marriage to Carl Bernstein, which I admittedly did not know [I wasn’t born when it happened!] but adds another fascinating layer. As with Carty-Williams’ Queenie, Nora recounts the discovery of the affair and the subsequent steps she takes with laugh-out-loud funny asides, deeply astute commentary, and, of course, regularly interspersed recipes, one of my personal favorite aspects of the book. It’s filled to the brim with warmth and wit.
And, if you’re an Audible fan, Meryl Streep narrates this one [she also stars in the film adaption with Jack Nicholson, for which Nora wrote the screenplay, but, like I always say…read the book first!]