Lawson’s first book, a memoir of growing up dirt poor in rural Texas, was a hugely popular hit in 2017 and sat at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. In it Lawson dealt obliquely with her mental illness, reframing it as the cultural by-product of her delightfully eccentric family. Her father is a taxidermist with an equal interest in living animals, and once sent her to school with a flock of turkeys that he insisted were “jumbo quail”. Her mother, meanwhile, had a habit of dressing Lawson and her sister in Little House on the Prairie smocking and sunbonnets, with the result that they resembled “the lesbian love children of Laura Ingalls and Hollie Hobbie”. Let’s Pretend This Never Happened was a bit like My Family and Other Animals, but ruder and with more stuffed bobcats.
The texture of Furiously Happy, however, is altogether more jagged. When Lawson announces at the beginning that this will be “a collection of bizarre essays and confused thoughts” she is spot-on. Whereas Let’s Pretend was written, like so many first books, over a decade during which seams had been smoothed and corners nicely jointed, Furiously Happy is a scrappy, blog-like affair. Indeed, it reads like a series of bulletins about hanging on to your mental stability by your fingernails – if only you hadn’t pulled them out long ago, thanks to a propensity for self-harm. “I am broken,” Lawson admits, before turning it into a badge of honour and a battle cry – “I am broken. Come Join Me.”
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