You're Leaving When?
Adventures in Downward Mobility
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3.6 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Finalist for the Thurber Prize for American Humor
"In this surprisingly upbeat memoir, Annabelle Gurwitch writes about the financial curveballs that can hit you in midlife . . . Somehow, Ms. Gurwitch manages to find humor in these setbacks. Ultimately, this is a story about harnessing resilience and learning how life’s disappointments can teach you about the things that matter most." —Tara Parker-Pope, The New York Times
From the New York Times bestselling author of I See You Made an Effort comes a timely and hilarious chronicle of downward mobility, financial and emotional.
With signature "sharp wit" (NPR), Annabelle Gurwitch gives irreverent and empathetic voice to a generation hurtling into their next chapter with no safety net and proves that our no-frills new normal doesn't mean a deficit of humor.
In these essays, Gurwitch embraces homesharing, welcoming a housing-insecure young couple and a bunny rabbit into her home. The mother of a college student in recovery who sheds the gender binary, she relearns to parent, one pronoun at a time. She wades into the dating pool in a Miss Havisham-inspired line of lingerie and flunks the magic of tidying up.
You're Leaving When? is for anybody who thought they had a semblance of security but wound up with a fragile economy and a blankie. Gurwitch offers stories of resilience, adaptability, low-rent redemption, and the kindness of strangers. Even in a muted Zoom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Actress Gurwitch (Wherever You Go, There They Are) examines life in Los Angeles in these delightfully snarky essays. Gurwitch writes of embracing the home-sharing trend and taking in a colorful array of roommates, most notably Jean Luc—a bacon-loving, chain-smoking 27-year-old Frenchman—and later, a young couple and their pet rabbit. She respectfully recounts supporting her former son, Ezra, as they identified as nonbinary and queer, an experience that taught her to relearn her pronouns "one day at a time." Gurwitch can find humor practically anywhere, even in articulating every Angeleno's worst fear: the probability of a major earthquake: "When the Big One hits, it's going to be a rollicking ride," she writes about her house, which is directly over an earthquake fault zone. The city's weather patterns ("Our weather forecasts should simply read: ‘Biblical' ") are another favorite target. While her style is mostly irreverent, Gurwitch also has a serious side, which comes out in her frank writing about being a mother with a kid in rehab: "I wore my consistent lack of improvement as a badge of honor. I was reliably inept. In a world that was constantly changing, at least I was consistent." By turns bittersweet and hilarious, these spot-on musings will strike a chord with anyone stuck in a spot of bother.
Customer Reviews
Searingly accurate and wonderfully funny.
Annabelle Gurwitch depicts the predicaments of women in middle age with unparing honesty and the hilarity that comes when you have total identification with the author’s escapades and cultural references. Anyone male or female, between the ages of 50 and 75 will recognize the terrifying social and economic pressure experienced when facing a new, unforeseen chapter of life. Anyone younger than 50 will recognize with the same hilarity the experience of their parents in the new gig economy. This a brilliant, hilarious and moving account of our adventures in 21st century middle age. Gurwitch’s humor is valiant and her observations are so on target the reader thinks surely she has been inside their brain. A wonderful social commentary disguised as great memoir.