'Let's Pretend This Never Happened': 7 stories from a memoir by The Bloggess

From a pet turkey to Post-It arguments, here are seven stories from popular blogger Jenny Lawson's new book 'Let's Pretend This Never Happened.'

4. Surprise bobcat

Melanie Stetson Freeman

One of the first times Lawson brought her boyfriend – later husband – Victor home for dinner with her parents, she wrote that her father had an unusual practical joke in mind. "My mom and I were on the couch, and from our vantage point we could see my father tiptoeing into the room," she wrote. "He gestured with a finger to his lips not to let Victor know that he was behind him and a live bobcat was tucked under his right arm. This probably would have been my exact worst nightmare of bringing a boy home to meet my parents, if I'd ever had enough creativity to imagine my father throwing a live bobcat on the boy I was trying to impress.... My eyes widened in horror as my father loomed over and yelled in his booming, cheerful voice, 'HELLOOOOO, VICTOR,' while tossing a live bobcat on him." Lawson's father, with hands now free of bobcat, then stuck one out for Victor to shake. Lawson says Victor tensed and took a deep breath as the bobcat landed on his chair, then "turned in slow motion to shake my dad's hand....Then he turned back to my mom and kept talking as if nothing could be more natural."

4 of 7

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.