Jenny Lawson, Full-Grown Mammal: An Introduction

You probably just picked up this book thinking, What the shit is this all about? And frankly I’m right there with you. Honestly, I just got here myself. By the time you read this it will be an actual, fully formed, and probably horribly offensive book, but at the moment I’m writing this it’s just a bunch of sentences, paralyzing anxiety, and a lot of angst. Some people write a book a week, but I’m achingly slow and filled with self-doubt and writer’s block, so by the time you read this I will have gone through years of “WRITING IS SO LONELY AND I HATE EVERYTHING AND EVERYONE.” I will have gone through the writing period when I tell my husband that real writers write drunk and edit sober, and then later the editing period when I tell him I have edited this notion and have to write drunk and also edit drunk, and even the period where I just lock myself in a room and force myself to write and it’s glorious and beautiful until I wake up the next day and realize it’s garbage and delete everything.

You, on the other hand, will only see the finished product. Shiny and edited and pasted together with the tears of copy editors whom I have sent to an early grave and/or multiple bars. Will it be worth it? No damn idea. But I can’t stop, because writers write always. Not well, necessarily. But they write. And you are a reader. So you read. (Unless you are listening to the audiobook, in which case, I guess you are a hearer? Is that right? That seems like the wrong word but I can’t think of the correct one right now. But I bet you’re a great hearer, even if that word doesn’t exist.) I don’t even know you and I can tell you’re special. Mostly because everyone seems special to me. Granted, some of that is because I have avoidant personality disorder and imposter syndrome, which automatically makes me think everyone in the world is better than me, and some of it is because you’re still reading this (or hearering it) even though it’s pretty obvious that I’m stalling because I’m not sure what to write about; I appreciate that and I owe you a drink.

(OH! “LISTENING TO.” Those are the words I was looking for. Not “hearering.” Although I sort of like the melody of the word “hearering” now, so let’s keep it.)

This whole introduction is a pretty good indication of the baffling wordsmithery that you can expect here, and that’s a good thing because 1) now you’ve been warned, so you can’t blame me if you hate this book, and 2) you’re going to feel so much better about yourself in comparison.

I’m not just saying that to flatter you. Truly. I have managed to fuck shit up in shockingly impressive ways and still be considered a fairly acceptable person. In some ways I’ve actually made it my living. And because I’m so good at being publicly terrible, other people feel comfortable telling me about how awful they are at being an adult, and then I try to top them with a “Oh, you think that’s bad? Let me tell you how I tried to rescue a decapitated human head from my work,” and then they’re like, “Nah. HOLD MY BEER,” and in the end I end up with a new best friend because how could you not love a person who couldn’t understand where those terrible farting noises were coming from on the bus but then she realized that they were the noises of the dog toy in her purse that she was leaning on and everyone looked at her and so she ended up shaking a rubber foot at them while yelling, “I’M NOT FARTING. IT’S MY DOG’S FOOT.” Answer: You can’t. YOU LOVE THEM. Hard.

It’s weird because we often try to present our fake, shiny, happy selves to others and make sure we’re not wearing too-obvious pajamas at the grocery store, but really, who wants to see that level of fraud? No one. What we really want is to know we’re not alone in our terribleness. We want to appreciate the failure that makes us perfectly us and wonderfully relatable to every other person out there who is also pretending that they have their shit together and didn’t just eat that onion ring that fell on the floor. Human foibles are what make us us, and the art of mortification is what brings us all together.

A lot of people read my books because they love to laugh about all the terrible things you maybe shouldn’t laugh at. I hope you find this book just as funny, but there’s some really serious and raw stuff in here too, mostly related to my battles with mental illness. If I could choose the themes of my life, I assure you this book would be all about my successful otter rescue and how I became a sexy vampire who isn’t allergic to dairy. But we don’t get to pick who we are. I am still as broken as I was before, but with better stories and a little more insight into just how fucked up I am.

Even the title for this introduction comes from a conversation I had with a friend where we tried to win “worst at adulting.” I pointed out that I could barely even be human and that at most I was just a full-grown mammal. But then I remembered that the thing that makes you a mammal is laying live young instead of eggs and lactating, but I couldn’t even lactate properly. But then I remembered that men don’t lay live young and they’re still mammals, and I thought maybe I needed to consult a science book because I’d fucked up the definition, or that maybe it was another situation where men just get a pass because of that whole “I own a penis” thing, and then my friend was like, “I don’t think you’re supposed to say that you ‘lay’ live young,” and I was like, “Yeah. Poor phrasing on my part. But in my defense, I can’t even mammal correctly,” and she refused to accept that and insisted that I recognize my accomplishments. “You are Jenny Lawson, full-grown mammal!” she said encouragingly and with confidence, and I said, “I think you just came up with my next book title,” and she was like, “I think you could do better,” but GUESS WHAT? I CAN’T AND NOW I FEEL BAD AGAIN.

But fuck that. Fuck feeling bad about eating floor onion rings. Fuck the shame that comes from wearing your clothes to bed so you’re technically never (or always) in your pajamas. Fuck the people who make you feel bad for glorifying the odd behavior and questionable decisions that make you who you are. Those things are perfectly acceptable.

Be good. Be kind. Love each other. Fuck everything else. The only thing that matters is how you feel and how you’ve made others feel. And I feel okay (for the moment), and I make others feel okay by being a barometer of awkwardness and self-doubt.

I am Jenny Lawson, full-grown mammal.

And I am ready to begin.

I Already Forgot I Wrote This

I don’t remember the first time I noticed I was losing my memory. This sounds like a joke but I only laughed when I read it again and realized how ridiculous it sounds. Extremely ridiculous, but to many of you who are nodding in agreement at what you just read, it’s also extremely true. Also, now I’ll have to remind half of you why you were nodding, and it’s because I was talking about memory loss. And if you looked back at the first sentence to verify that that’s what you were agreeing with because you didn’t trust that that’s what we were talking about, then you already know my pain.

I can blame some of this on my ADD, which gives me the attention level of a kitten on cocaine. One minute I’m having a brilliant thought (like wondering if flat-chested women ever get that sweaty underboob smell even if they don’t have underboob), and then I suddenly find myself standing in front of an open refrigerator and thinking, Why am I here? But not like Why am I here, and what is the purpose of life? More like Why am I in the kitchen? How did I get here? Why is there milk in this fridge if I’m lactose intolerant? WHOSE HOUSE IS THIS? And then I remember that other people live with me, and that they probably bought the milk, but then I think, Does milk always look that color? How do I know if it’s gone bad? and then I look for the expiration date on the jug and it says it’s “good through November” but it doesn’t have a year so I don’t know if it’s November of this year or last year so I end up standing there at the fridge in confusion, holding the milk in my hand, wondering if it’s either very fresh or completely poisonous, and then Victor walks in and says, “Close the damn fridge. And why are you holding the milk? You don’t even drink milk,” and I say, “What year is this?” and he looks at me as if I’ve lost my mind. Probably because he doesn’t realize that I’m really asking what year the milk is from, not what year we’re currently living in. Except then I start to wonder what year it is because I’ve gotten that wrong before. Then he gives me one of those concerned, irritated looks, but mostly because I’m letting all the cold air out of the refrigerator and less because he thinks I figured out time travel and I’m Jenny from the future who just returned from some sort of time loop where I killed someone who was worse than Hitler but who you don’t know about because I killed him (which would be my first thought if someone asked me what year it was because I give people the benefit of the doubt, Victor). And also a little because he thinks I’m losing my mind. Mostly the fridge thing though, because he’s used to the latter. If I’m being honest though, that confused irritation is probably one of the most stable parts of our relationship, and I think if I suddenly started to make sense now he’d suspect I’d been abducted by aliens.

Which—now that I think about it—I might have been, because the alien theory would account for all this missing time I’ve lost. It would explain all the times I find myself in the closet thinking, Why am I here and who bought all these shoes? Or panickedly telling Victor that I can’t find my phone while I’m actually talking to him on it. Victor says it wouldn’t explain that last part, but you don’t know what aliens do, Victor. They’re unpredictable. Probably. I don’t really remember. WHICH PROVES MY POINT.

Remember that.

For me.

Copyright © Jenny Lawson 2021, 2022