A review by emscji
Cool, Calm & Contentious by Merrill Markoe

3.0

1/20/2012: Merrill Markoe is hilarious--she kept me reading and laughing (quietly, to myself, I was on a crowded airplane) to the end. This new collection of her essays was a (very nice) Kindle Christmas present; I had never heard of her before, and now I'm glad I have! (Makes me feel younger…!) As she points out, the funniest jokes spring from negative experience--and those are the funniest parts of the book, when she is describing her awful relationship with her mother. Black humor for sure, but she's good at it--incredibly articulate--and it sounds so very familiar. Her conversations with her dogs are my other favorite essays. Though her musings on the difficulty of finding appropriate (and non-narcissistic) boyfriends are also great…hmm. Maybe I'll have to reconsider….