1) Since I find her hilarious (and I also love looking at pictures of her adorable pets), I read Lancaster's blog pretty regularly. That left me with an overwhelming sense of deja vu when reading several of the chapters in this memoir. I noticed that to a certain extent in My Fair Lazy, but it didn't bother me as much. This time around, it felt like a lot of the incidents that made it into the book had already appeared on the blog. And while I found most of the stories amusing the first time around, I was excited about reading NEW material, not slightly-fleshed out versions of old material. I mean, I get that having a blog that you update with any sort of frequency AND trying to publish a memoir every couple of years is going to result in a certain amount of overlap. It just bugged me more this time than it has in the past, for some reason.

2) This is a personal pet peeve of mine, but it drives me absolutely nuts when memoirs are not chronological. Lancaster's own Bright Lights, Big Ass has this problem. Tina Fey actually does the same thing in Bossypants. I get that Jeneration X is less of a story and more of a series of episodes, structured around "reluctant adult lesson(s) learned." However, it drives me inexplicably nuts when I can tell that an event in chapter 12 came months before an event back in chapter 7. Since there didn't seem to be a buildup of lessons -- say, moving from small to most significant/profound -- I'm not sure why the events couldn't have just unfolded in time order. Again, this is really a personal quirk, and weird because I love a good circular structure in fiction -- frame narratives that weave through time are my absolute favorite! But for some reason it irritates me when a true story can't just happen in order. It seems...ADD, I guess.

On a positive note, this book made me laugh out loud a number of times, which is really all I'm looking for when I pick up one of Lancaster's books. It was a great brain cleanser after spending the last few months with A Song of Ice and Fire. It felt nice to read something that required far less brain power and exactly zero boring detours to the desert.