Wednesday, November 20, 2024

Humor Me

Humor Me by Cat Shook, 306 pages

From the outside, Presley Fry is on the ramp to her dream job. She's a producer's assistant on a late night TV show (the one she grew up watching), thanks to a leg up from a family friend's husband, who happened to be an executive at the network. But Presley is also dealing with lingering unresolved feelings from the death of her alcoholic mother 18 months earlier, and when she runs into her mom's old friend just before that friend's network exec husband gets named in the #metoo movement, her grief and the friend's stress become a bit too much to bear.

I feel like that's a fairly bad description of a nuanced look at life as a young female professional in New York during 2017. Because that's what this book is. It captures being a 20-something who is in the "putting in the work" part of a career that's eventually going to be amazing. It captures the complex emotions that accompany the death of a loved one that you sometimes didn't like all that much. It captures the confusing dating scene that exists in friends, hookups, and way too many apps. All in all, it's a pretty fantastic book.

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