Why I'm Like This: True Stories

Categories: Romance , Parenting & Families , Nonfiction

Cynthia Kaplan went to summer camp and school dances, had a crush on Jamie Karlan, got dumped by boyfriends, struggled with her career, sought the approval of her parents, cared for her ill grandmother, got married, became a mother, and tried to live her life the best she knew how. 

If you see yourself in any of these scenarios, then you understand the happiness and heartache of being a woman. 

But if you think Why I'm Like This: True Stories is going to be an overly sentimental book, think again. Often compared to David Sedaris, Kaplan's personal essays are funny and sad yet refreshingly frank, as if she is examining her life under a microscope.

Take, for instance, her description of a school dance: "Kevin Parker, between girlfriends, or maybe just out of pity, maybe it was a pity dance, took me by the hand and like Moses leading the Israelites from bondage, led me from the shadows of the folded wood bleachers out onto the light-dappled (mirror ball) gym floor.”

Or visiting her father at the hospital: "I cry intermittently in the car on the way to Greenwich Hospital to see my father, who has had a heart attack.  I feel as though my head will explode from the surely combustible combination of a) relief that cigarette-smoking, bacon-munching Jack Kaplan has finally arrived at the moment he’d been gunning for all these years and probably was going to live to tell the tale and b) fear that the fact that I’m wearing blue jeans and clunky shoes to the hospital will aggravate my mother.”

Reading Kaplan’s writing is like having a long phone conversation with your best friend.  When you hang up this book, be sure to read her newest collection of essays, Leave the Building Quickly: True Stories.