A review by haimson
The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History by Jonathan Franzen

3.0

I listened to this as an audiobook on the way back from Bloomington. It was pretty entertaining, just a lot of stories about Franzen's childhood and adolescence. Once he gets to be a grownup though he gets super obsessed with bird watching, which is not exactly the most fun thing to read about. And he seriously goes on about it. Also, he expresses very conflicting views about environmentalism throughout the book, which makes it a little hard to figure out what exactly he is trying to say. He does sound like a pretty bad boyfriend for the most part in his stories about relationships, but, it's good that he's being honest instead of just painting himself in a good light. Memoirs sometimes make me somewhat embarrassed/nervous for the author, because I can imagine how rough it must be for your entire family and all your exes to read all your intimate thoughts about them. It reminds me of writing zines/songs and being freaked out all the time knowing that everyone knows all this stuff about me. This is also a memoir that mentions alot about books that Franzen read in college, which was cool because it was all German literature, and made me kind of want to study German again.