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Sunday, August 27, 2006
Comic 'Weird' Bypasses Chick-Lit Clichés
By Review by Sarah H. Wolf
Benny Bernstein's living the life of your friend in L.A.— the girl you knew in college who maybe followed her aspiring actor boyfriend to California, promptly broke up with him and found a crappy job and a crappy apartment somewhere in the Valley.
That friend.
Author Pamela Ribon has hijacked your friend's life and turned it into a rollicking page-turner.
At the beginning of "Why Moms are Weird," Benny is trying to sort out the lifestyle of the broke and mundane— maneuvering through the minefield of super-lowrise jeans after losing weight, entering into a relationship with a guy she met at Albertsons and juggling her mother's long distance sexual antics.
Seriously, the book opens with Benny's mother calling from Virginia and saying the five words you never want to hear from your mom: "I think I have chlamydia."
Benny treats her mother's dating antics with exasperation, but from a distance. She's (kind of) living it up in L.A., until her mother calls with an emergency, and Benny decides to drop her job, sublet her apartment and fly back to Virginia to sort out her family's life.
It's when Benny gets back home that Ribon sinks into meaty territory.
In Benny's absence, her mother has turned into a hoarder, cramming her home full of garage sale finds, while Benny's sister has turned the backyard into an impromptu shelter for evil dogs. Benny takes it upon herself to fix everything— the house, her mother's dating life, her sister's out-of-control night life— except nobody has really asked for a life makeover.
This isn't a prototypical chick-lit novel; the plot isn't overshadowed by designer name-dropping, bosses from hell or tired descriptions of last season's couture.
Rather, Ribon turns her focus on characters who might as well be real. Their lives, their problems, and the decisions they make ring true.
Ribon honed her writing skills as the creator of pamie.com, a popular Web site/blog that chronicles her life as a comedy writer living in Los Angeles.
Here she takes the three-jokes-a-page structure and uses it to mine comedy gems out of everyday family dysfunction, and everything's a target from the lingering angst of adolescence to the chagrin at meeting the mother's boyfriends.
Ribon has crafted Benny to a fully realized, sympathetic protagonist, an intelligent woman who lost her way at some point, but manages to stumble toward happiness. The result is fantastic and satisfying.
Sarah H. Wolf is a design assistant for the Journal.
"Why Moms are Weird" by Pamela Ribon
Downtown Press, $13, 304 pp.