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3.95 AVERAGE
3.95 AVERAGE
Very funny, and a great mix of personal and ridiculous (well, it's all personal). I never experienced so many feelings for boys as a pre-teen nor a teenager, let alone wrote so much feeling down, but it's fun to root through someone else's memory box, especially when she's got such a good sense of humor about it all.
This book had me laughing and cringing at the exploits of Little Pam. I am so glad I'm not a teenager anymore.
I can't imagine sharing my teenage journals/letters with anyone, so I'm glad Pamela Ribon did it for us so we can all laugh along with her - we've all been there, girl. I also loved this book as a peek into what it was like to be a teenager in the 90s - Little Pam felt like a friend and a kindred spirit. An unfortunately rare female coming-of age story that's hilarious, vulnerable, and insightful.
Mortifying indeed. But filled with some real humor, and probably will make you cringe with recognition.
At one point, reading this book on the commute to work, I started laughing so hard that I had to press my face into the bus window, and the elderly lady next to me got worried and moved away to sit somewhere else. So my first comment about this wonderful book is that you probably shouldn't read it in public, or around any other people at all, because of the peals of unattractive, deeply hysterical laughter that you will spill all over the place.
Pamela Ribon spent her adolescence writing love letters to boys. She's still got the first drafts in a box. In some cases, you hope that she's got the only draft in that box, because the idea of her delivering them - as she apparently frequently did - to the addressed recipients is delightfully horrifying. From the 200-page letter she wrote at 13 to her first love, through her 15-year-old pining angst letters and poems, and her 16 and 17-year-old toe-curlingly awkward "erotica", Pamela's got them all and reprints them here in all their excrutiating detail, along with anecdotes of her doomed love affairs with Holly Hunter Boy, Nice Boy, Soft Hair, Super Mario Brothers Boy and my personal favourite, Gumpubes Boy.
It takes a brave woman to bare her teenaged soul, and I admire Ribon whole-heartedly for sharing these notes with the world; yes, they are incredibly, gut-wrenchingly funny, but they clearly meant a lot to "Little Pam", as she refers to her teenage self, and in-between the laughter there are long moments where you want to cuddle Little Pam and tell her that boys are mean and this is never going to happen again and maybe she should put the metaphors down and step away from them for her own good. Most of us can still recall the seriousness of teenage love, and the awfulness of heartbreak, pining, and all that poetry we wrote and thought was so deep when it... really wasn't, and Ribon's memoirs here are a lovely and occasionally skin-crawlingly uncomfortable reminder of the universal experience of hormones, first love, friendship, pining, and negotiating the establishment of one's identity.
As with most things, it's not all hilarity and tricky metaphors involving bottles of rain: I'll add in here a trigger warning for some brief relationship violence, an uncomfortably controlling homelife, and a sensitively handled background of child molestation. And there's also a chapter about victim-blaming that I think everyone should be forced to sit down and read: for once, the tears in my eyes weren't from laughter. Ribon is a very funny writer, but she's also a smart, sharp one, and what I initially entered into as a light-hearted collection of teenaged letters ended up moving me far beyond what I expected.
Notes To Boys is rather like re-living your teenage years, actually: mostly it's hilarious to look back on how seriously we took everything, how clever we thought we were, how much we thought we knew, and how we recorded ourselves in the world, but there's a bittersweetness to it all, an underlying darkness and some real heartbreak in here. Some small part of me even wants to go back to being a teenager again, having read this; however, before I do that, there's a spiral-bound dark blue notebook that I need to find and destroy, just in case...
Pamela Ribon spent her adolescence writing love letters to boys. She's still got the first drafts in a box. In some cases, you hope that she's got the only draft in that box, because the idea of her delivering them - as she apparently frequently did - to the addressed recipients is delightfully horrifying. From the 200-page letter she wrote at 13 to her first love, through her 15-year-old pining angst letters and poems, and her 16 and 17-year-old toe-curlingly awkward "erotica", Pamela's got them all and reprints them here in all their excrutiating detail, along with anecdotes of her doomed love affairs with Holly Hunter Boy, Nice Boy, Soft Hair, Super Mario Brothers Boy and my personal favourite, Gumpubes Boy.
It takes a brave woman to bare her teenaged soul, and I admire Ribon whole-heartedly for sharing these notes with the world; yes, they are incredibly, gut-wrenchingly funny, but they clearly meant a lot to "Little Pam", as she refers to her teenage self, and in-between the laughter there are long moments where you want to cuddle Little Pam and tell her that boys are mean and this is never going to happen again and maybe she should put the metaphors down and step away from them for her own good. Most of us can still recall the seriousness of teenage love, and the awfulness of heartbreak, pining, and all that poetry we wrote and thought was so deep when it... really wasn't, and Ribon's memoirs here are a lovely and occasionally skin-crawlingly uncomfortable reminder of the universal experience of hormones, first love, friendship, pining, and negotiating the establishment of one's identity.
As with most things, it's not all hilarity and tricky metaphors involving bottles of rain: I'll add in here a trigger warning for some brief relationship violence, an uncomfortably controlling homelife, and a sensitively handled background of child molestation. And there's also a chapter about victim-blaming that I think everyone should be forced to sit down and read: for once, the tears in my eyes weren't from laughter. Ribon is a very funny writer, but she's also a smart, sharp one, and what I initially entered into as a light-hearted collection of teenaged letters ended up moving me far beyond what I expected.
Notes To Boys is rather like re-living your teenage years, actually: mostly it's hilarious to look back on how seriously we took everything, how clever we thought we were, how much we thought we knew, and how we recorded ourselves in the world, but there's a bittersweetness to it all, an underlying darkness and some real heartbreak in here. Some small part of me even wants to go back to being a teenager again, having read this; however, before I do that, there's a spiral-bound dark blue notebook that I need to find and destroy, just in case...
Oh, Little Pam.
It's legitimately rare for me to actually laugh out loud while reading a book. I'm not sure I've laughed at any writing as hard as I laughed at the "My Year of Dicks" chapter.
The only thing keeping me from giving it five stars is that some of the material in here is actually pretty heavy (though well done!) so switching gears was just a little jarring. But really, this is just so mortifying and hilarious and touching and life affirming.
It's legitimately rare for me to actually laugh out loud while reading a book. I'm not sure I've laughed at any writing as hard as I laughed at the "My Year of Dicks" chapter.
The only thing keeping me from giving it five stars is that some of the material in here is actually pretty heavy (though well done!) so switching gears was just a little jarring. But really, this is just so mortifying and hilarious and touching and life affirming.