Carrie Pilby

It’s snowing again.  *cracks knuckles*  It’s making me twitchy.  But the upside to ass tons of snow every three days, is catching up on some of my reading.  And not just Penthouse Letters.  I finally finished Carrie Pilby, written by another Hobokenite, Caren Lissner.

It’s damn witty.  You know I’m a sucker for witty, Interwebz.

…having a car in New York is like having a baby.  They start crying in the middle of the night.  You constantly have to worry about where they are.  You have to mop up their leaks.

Shit.  Which reminds me I need to move the car.  Which means I first have to dig the car out of the snow bank.  Which means I probably ought to try and find a pair of gloves.  Dammit, I hate winter.  And alternate side parking.  And Rod Stewart.

Twenty bucks says I forget all about the car before I even finish writing this damn post.  Where was I?

Right – the story, told by a precocious, awkward twenty-something who has more intelligence than common sense, is one girl’s struggle to change her “social-outcast status.”  She’s very literal, and as a result, feels deceived by nearly everyone she knows.  Ok fine, she’s too smart for her own good, and it’s made her bitter.

Nowadays, I don’t think every man is evil, but the good ones can also get a good-looking woman, so a woman who isn’t good-looking just has to lower and lower her standards until they’re down around her ankles.  It’s not fair; it’s just life.

But of course she’s bitter.  She’s lonely, soul-crushingly lonely.  And we’ve all felt that, haven’t we?  Alone?  Neglected?  Unworthy?

But there are some things that just aren’t fair, or as they should be in life, as much as you want them to be.  Like that thing about there being one right person in the world for everyone.  I believed that when I was little, but it’s not scientific, and even though I have maybe fifteen or twenty more years ahead of me to find out for sure, I did go through four years at college and found no one.  It makes more sense, mathematically, that there are negative-four people in the world who are right for someone like me, and about six who are right for a busty twenty-two-year-old-girl who’s beautiful and sprightly and outgoing, so it averages to one for each person.  But it really isn’t.

But she has that glimmer of hope.  She knows what she wants, even if she doesn’t quite know how to find it.  Who doesn’t want companionship and understanding?  And the thing about Carrie Pilby that makes it so much more enjoyable than your typical Harlequin Teen Romance, is that this quest for a connection isn’t limited to the romantic.  Our heroine is even more desperate to find a friend.

I’ll bet there are people in the world who couldn’t go a few hours without someone noticing they’re missing.  And there are people who could die Friday after work, and no one would notice until Monday.  But for me, it could take an entire week.  Perhaps that is a way to gauge how much you are loved in the world – how long it would take people to notice that you’re missing.  Right now, I would not fare well.

And this passage?  *sigh*  Makes me swoon.  My favorite thing on earth is sitting in a crowded coffee shop, safe in a corner booth with a dear friend, where our debate about some inconsequential detail of our mundane lives becomes so engaging that we completely lose sight of the screaming babies and harried assistants on cellphones that clatter around us.

Each of us should have the feeling, even if only for once in our life, of having someone so entranced by us that every inconsequential thing about us becomes an object of fascination.  Any old piece of debris that’s poking around in our soul can be offered up for voracious consumption.

Oh don’t worry, Interwebz.  It’s not as serious as all that.  Despite the heart-wrenching premise, Carrie Pilby made me snarf out loud on more than one crowded train while I was reading.

I wonder what it’s like to be a father of a daughter and know that eventually, she is going to be defiled in some way.  It may take thirteen years, or seventeen, or thirty-one, but sooner or later, your princess is going to have a prince’s jewels in her silk pillow.  I guess you either have to not think about it or pretend it doesn’t exist.  Like headcheese.

So if you’re looking for some more winter reading, or you’re a lucky bitch headed off to a tropical island and need some beach reading, give Carrie Pilby a try.