The Complete Neurotic's Notebook

by Mignon McLaughlin

191 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

About the author

Mignon McLaughlin was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and grew up in New York City, where her mother, Joyce Neuhaus, was a prominent lawyer. Mignon graduated from Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1933 and returned to New York, where she embarked on a career as a journalist and a powerful and touching writer of short stories for Redbook, Cosmopolitan, and other women's magazines.

She worked for Vogue magazine in the 1940s, and was Copy Editor and Managing Editor of Glamour magazine in the 1960s and early 1970s. With her husband Robert McLaughlin—an editor at TIME Magazine—she wrote the play Gayden, which had a limited run on Broadway during the 1949 season. McLaughlin authored the first and second Neurotic's Notebooks.


She retired to Florida in 1973. She died in Coral Gables, Florida on December 20, 1983.

Reviews

[Bee☕]

A goldmine find at a used bookstore, this is a collection of observance, witty sayings, proverbs, and sage ideas on humanity: life, love, and relationships. Combined here in one collection, these were once two separate publications by McLaughlin published in 1963 and 1966, respectively.

I found myself laughing, turning the page, suddenly struck with deep musings and introspection, and the next page filling me with hope or a mutual understanding in her writing, "Isnt THAT the truth!". I very much enjoyed this. Highly recommended.

A few gems:
We hear only half of what is said to us, understand only half of that, believe only half of that, and remember only half of that.

Don't be yourself. Be someone a little nicer.

If it came true, it wasn’t much of a dream.

We are all born brave, trusting and greedy, and most of us remain greedy.

There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today.

[Catalina]

“Women do not live longer than men; they only exist longer.” 😟

[Karen-Leigh]

How to be anxious, hostile and defensive-while loving every miserable minute of it.

If the truth is hard to swallow, it's best to do it with the kind of grimace called a smile.