Product Description

Meet the men in Diana Joseph’s life: “The boy,” Diana’s fourteen-year-old son, who supports the NRA and dreams of living in a house with wall-to-wall carpeting; Diana’s father, who’s called her on the telephone twice, ever, and who sat her down when she was twelve to caution her against becoming a slut (she didn’t listen); Diana’s brothers, or, as her father calls them, “the two assholes”; Diana’s ex-husband, a lumberjack with three ex-wives, yet he’s still the first one she calls when she’s in a jam; and Diana’s common-law husband, Al, an English professor who’s been mistakenly called mentally challenged. Ostensibly organized around the various men in Diana’s life, this is really a memoir about what it’s like to be a modern, smart woman making her way in the world.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #295817 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 208 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780399155284
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Booklist
A rite of passage for many teens is the sex talk. For debut memoirist Joseph, it was the “slut” talk administered by her hard-edged father. “See, what happens is sometimes a girl will go with this one, and then she’ll go with that one, and then she thinks, what the hell, that one there doesn’t look so bad, why not go with that one, too,” he’d opine as he pulled on an unfiltered Lucky. In the years that followed, Joseph’s life was peppered with prickly relationships with the opposite sex, from boyfriends so icky they became woeful stories recounted over strawberry margaritas to an ex-husband who broke her heart (but still fixes her brakes). She buys her son a doll to put him in touch with his feminine side but later decides she’d rather groom him to be the next Bruce Springsteen. Joseph’s mordant sense of humor helps her make hay from harrowing life experiences. But there are poignant moments here, too, where emotional pain is played for more than just laughs. --Allison Block

Review
“Ms. Joseph’s sense of the apt detail, of the rapid-fire of human commerce, of the way the important gets hidden in the flippant, the hilarity of it all, the sadness, too, the sympathy she emits and provokes for the complexity of just living— all that makes this book irresistible to me.”
—Richard Ford

“Somehow hard-boiled and warmhearted all at once, Joseph’s stories have an unflinching honesty and a wry appreciation for the absurdities of masculinity and motherhood.”
—Sarah Vowell, author of Assassination Vacation

“I'm Sorry You Feel That Way might sound like a sideways swipe at a memoir, but nothing could be further from the truth — it manages to be nostalgic, sad, and pee-in-your-pants funny.” A–
— Entertainment Weekly

“Like the best storytellers –fictional or otherwise – Diana Joseph treats her people with compassion. She manages to be very funny. But she refuses to reduce her family to a comedy routine. Her stories are often sad, but she never lionizes suffering. Instead, she sifts through the ruins of her romantic and emotional entanglements, with an eye on the absurdities we endure in the name of love…I'm Sorry You Feel That Way is sure to offend the faint of heart, but it's hard to recall another collection of essays, or a memoir, with more natural charm.”
— The Los Angeles Times

About the Author
Diana Joseph has worked as a waitress, a short-order cook, a typist, and a teacher. Her essay “The Boy” won the Kentucky Women Writers Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Joseph currently teaches in the MFA program at Minnesota State University, Mankato.

Customer Reviews

I'm So Glad She Felt That Way, or Turning Memoir On Its Head
Diana Joseph's I'm Sorry You Feel That Way is my new Favorite Book. By that, I mean Favorite Ever, the kind I talk about incessantly, whip out and read aloud, buy for my friends and family and generally insist everyone I know stop everything they're doing and read now (the last one was Jeannette Walls' The Glass Castle).

Lest you think that's hyperbolic, let me tell you when this book is so amazing. Firstly, I read a lot of memoirs, and even the most compelling ones can take on a certain sameness: I did this, I went through tragedy, I did this. Not to knock the genre, because I gravitate towards it, but what Joseph's done here is to turn the memoir on its head. On the surface, these are character studies of the men in her life, and as character studies, they should themselves be studied by fiction writers for their fine detail, their knack of getting inside her subjects' heads, whether it's her ex-husband, son, Satanist neighbor, or dog.

But then Joseph manages to bring the topic at hand back to herself in ways that are subtle yet extremely powerful. She talks about what these men (and animals) mean to her, how she is like them and different from them, what she gets out of her relationships with them, the complexity of the love she feels for them. In the process, she touches on sex, religion, family, motherhood, daughterhood, smoking, work, and pet ownership.

My favorite chapter by far is "The Girl Who Only Sometimes Said No," about looking at her son's yearbook with him, and trying to grapple with her own past as a slut (or perhaps a "slut") while conveying to him why judging women on their sexuality is wrong. Her writing is blunt, direct, and powerful. The scant few sentences about her being date raped are ones that linger in their scarcity.

I skipped around these essays, which Joseph makes it easy to do. Together, they cohere and make a narrative of a woman who got married and became a mom in her early twenties, was miserable and lonely and often lost-feeling, drank a lot, but got her bearings (her essay about her former colleague and how his alcoholism separated them is moving in its calm tragicness) and became a professor. I left the essay "Humping the Dinosaur" for last; I started it, but since I'm not a dog person and I thought it was about her dog (which it is), I kept putting it off. When I finally got to it, it contained a paragraph about crying, about losing it, about worrying incessantly, that was as honest and true and easily relateable as the rest of the book. That's the magic here; a chapter on her dog's humping problem is also about how she copes with stress.

By taking the winding road to tell her stories, Joseph makes us pause and truly look at the people she trains her pen on. Her compassion for them, her insight into what makes them tick, and why she's drawn to them, is at the heart of this book. Please do yourself a favor and check out I'm Sorry You Feel That Way. I have a feeling it just may become your new favorite book too.

I'm Sorry You Feel That Way
is the catchy title of Diana Joseph's book of essays about her life. Subtitled The Astonishing But True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog, Joseph recounts incidents from her life that made her the woman she is.

The book is an honest, funny and touching look at Diana's life. Her father, a man who preferred to be sans shirt most of the time, gave his twelve-year-old daughter some advice on boys: "Don't be a pig". Translation: Don't be a slut. She didn't take his advice, and frequently her choices in men were questionable.

She calls her now-teenage son 'the boy', and her description of raising a son mostly on her own reminded me of Anne LaMott's writing on the same topic. Single moms trying everyday to do their best, but struggling with not having enough money, exhaustion, depression and loneliness. She is not a matryr, just a human being.

Joseph is remarkably honest in her assessment of herself and others, and that is the strength of her book. She has the ability to see the good and bad that exists in all of us, and expresses that in her unique way.

The last essay of the book, 'Ten Million, At Least', is the most moving. Joseph lives with literature professor Al, a good guy who loves her and her boy. They love each other, but they also have their differences, which makes it difficult at times to cohabitate. If you don't tear up at the last two pages, you simply aren't human.

Diana Joseph has spent much of her life around men- her dad, her brothers, lovers, and her son- and that has colored the way she sees the world. Her book is an honest look at how a modern woman deals with bad habits, depression, sex, love, crummy jobs, poverty, pets, loneliness, rock and roll and family. It's humorous and moving, just like life. If you are a fan of David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell, add Diana Joseph to your reading list.

Acid etched stories from a hilariously unconventional life
In 15 highly entertaining segments, Ms. Joseph shares stories and characters from her unorthodox life. She has a wonderful ability to mix hilarity with pathos. The result being that many times you find yourself feeling great sympathy for her and the subjects of her story yet laughing uproariously at their blight.

Each chapter in the book features a different character. The characters range from her two pack-a-day bare chested father to her oft married/oft divorced ex-husband to her Devil loving upstairs neighbor to, most memorably, "the boy" her pro-NRA reactionary-conservative son. Ms. Joseph tells their stories (and hers) in a straight forward manner. Her descriptions of personalities and events are almost brutally unsympathetic. She allows the reader to make what they will of these people and of her story. (Though it is hard to imagine that anyone with an ounce of compassion or experience will be anything less than understanding and amused by most of her stories.) Not all of the chapters are humorous, "The girl who only sometimes said no" comes late in the book and casts a poignant shadow over the entire work.

Ms. Joseph is a talented writer, a gifted story teller and a woman who lives on her own terms.