Five Reasons To Be Like, "What The Fuck Was So Good About That Book"?

Maybe it's a minor quibble, but there's this thing Jessi Klein does at the end of each chapter of You'll Grow Out of It, which is a collection of personal essays from this comedic writer. It's this glib little kind of sort of couplet-sounding tag at the end, which is I think supposed to sound like a snappy encapsulation of the point but which comes off as lazily tacked on.

In truth, you see it all the time, and it seems essential if you've ever written anything — from an email to a memo to an op-ed piece — so much so that it just feels like you need to do it, sort of like that dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-duuuun in a blues song.

[It's called a "tag ending" or an "end tag" — this:

I tried to google it and immediately came across the concept in this "How to Write an Op-ed Article" piece: "Make your ending a winner."

The problem is that virtually nothing ends well. Novels end stupidly. Plays end stupidly. TV series end stupidly (Friday Night Lights excluded). Unless it's a trick, endings are inherently stupid. I thought The Usual Suspects had a great ending until I watched it years later with someone who'd never seen it and who saw it coming from a mile away. Plus, a suspenseful story is constructed with the ending in mind — sort of like a great country lyric. "Making your ending a winner" is so much of a vapid platitude that it . . . there, I almost got sucked into the cadence of point-making.

Anyway, Grow Out follows this format doggedly, and it comes across as fobbed off and lazy. It's another piece of writing that seems like a first pass (in retrospect, maybe it's unfair to single out any particular piece of writing, when really there's no real advantage to making something really wonderful when it can just be OK: blogs and comedy apparently share this; I'm sure there are other things). I'm pretty sure I can't read a room on this front, but I naively take for granted that if one is given the opportunity to publish something it should be the most completely extraordinary thing he or she can come up with, if not fucking brilliantly essential. Demand better: Fugazi at the high school talent show; Bobby Knight coming to career day; Daniel Day Lewis' bleak early years as a substitute drama teacher.

Instead, you have beach reading. Maybe a charmingly written column about this or that. An observational piece on Weekend Edition.

To Klein's credit, Grow doesn't shy away from the author's own hard truths: she's really successful, she likes nice things, she's privileged but you kind of feel she's earned it. Which is to say, if spa treatments are on her mind she won't hesitate to write about spa treatments. There's an honesty there that feels revealing, and that's still sort of bold. That said, every single person in our book club thought the thing was fucking terrible (I didn't think it was terrible, per se), and threw around words like "privileged" (do you know what a room costs at the Post Ranch Inn?!?!) "Manhattan," probably "vapid," maybe "vacuous" and (I'm pretty sure) "mostly unfunny" (or at least stuff like "I didn't laugh once").

Not to throw everyone under the bus (not that they give a flying fuck), but I didn't think Out was entirely terrible. I was surprised, however, given that Inside Amy Schumer, of which Klein is the executive producer, is so jaggedly transgressive — not to mention hilarious. So much of You'll seemed so tame. Not to say it has to be insanely progressively sun-blottingly poop-evacuatingly transgressive, but it felt positioned, calculated and — most deadly — safe. Like her management is positioning her to have a talk show or some such.

I did laugh at parts. And I thought there were parts that were more fleshed out and had smart — and inspired — takes. The epidural chapter toward the end ("get the epidural!") is one of those (it is adapted here — again, positioning). Part has to be the immediacy: I'd much rather talk about being a parent than being a dipshit struggling through a first job. But I also think there's room to dig deeper on those earlier anecdotes: weave stuff together, use the "winning ending" as a transition to two disparate ideas instead of a dull-thud paperweight.

Other moments were deft: she writes in one chapter about "lying about day drinking" then goes on to mention off-handedly about talking about day drinking with a guy she was flirting with — funny and perceptive but also maybe unintentional: which goes back to my point about how things seem a little undercooked (or maybe undersalted?) (oh fuck it, what I mean to say is that they're not as great as they could be). The chapter about Joan Rivers is good, too.

A point that I didn't make but others did, and really vociferously and pointedly, is that it's kind of a bullshit move (if not a "bad look") to perseverate on one's own perceived ugliness/use it as a bit when in reality one is actually very attractive. Some actually google imaged her while reading it to confirm a hunch/feel outraged.

Even if we all didn't entirely agree that it was fucking terrible, I'm pretty sure 100 percent of us agreed that You'll Grow was thin. Surprising to all was how universally praised it was ("hilarious" is a frequent — suspiciously frequent — adjective). It's as if there's something aspirational about wanting to feel amused, so much so that you can believe it to be true. I feel as if there should be some winning line that can be inserted here, so much so that I can feel it in my seat. It's just not happening. And so this must end.