Synopses & Reviews
Despite her forty years and a successful career as a rock journalist, Jancee Dunn still feels like a teenager, especially around her parents and sisters. Looking around, Dunn realizes that shes not alone in this regression: Her friends, all with successful jobs, marriages, and families of their own, still feel like kids around their moms and dads, too. That gets Dunn to thinking: Do we ever really grow up?
Why Is My Mother Getting a Tattoo? explores this phenomenon-through both Dunns coming to grips with getting older and her folks attempts to turn back the clock. In a series of hilarious and heartwarming essays, Dunn conspires with her sisters to finagle their way into the old family homestead, dissects the whys and wherefores of her parents obsession with newspaper clippings, confronts the seamy side of the JC Penney catalogs she paged through as a kid, and accompanies her sixtysomething mother to a New Jersey tattoo parlor, where Mom is giddy to get a raven inked onto her wrist. And Dunn does it all with humor and insight.
Synopsis
With the trademark humor and lovable spirit that infused her first memoir, But Enough About Me, Jancee Dunn turns to her evolving relationship, as a so-called adult, with her parents and family
In her early forties, Jancee Dunn began to wonder why she still felt like a thirteen-year-old around her family. Talking to her friends, she found the same was true for them--despite successful jobs, marriages, and families of their own. Do we ever really grow up, she wonders? Why is the slow, sticky process of prying ourselves free from our parents and childhoods so difficult?
In her new memoir, Dunn examines the phenomenon, with scenes ranging from a haunted Savannah tour gone wrong to a visit to a tattoo parlor with her sixty-ish mother, who is dying to get a raven inked on her wrist.
Finally, Dunn and her sisters arrange to visit the house where they grew up, a bittersweet but comic experience that answers her questions and puts her at peace with her parents--until the next tattoo parlor visit, at least.
About the Author
Jancee Dunn is the author of the novel Dont You Forget About Me and the memoir But Enough About Me. A former writer at Rolling Stone, she was a correspondent for Good Morning America and an MTV veejay. She has written for The New York Times, GQ, Vogue, O: The Oprah Magazine, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, writer Tom Vanderbilt.