Synopses & Reviews
Meet the men in Diana Josephs life: The boy, Dianas fourteen-year-old son, who supports the NRA and dreams of living in a house with wall-to-wall carpeting; Dianas father, whos called her on the telephone twice, ever, and who sat her down when she was twelve to caution her against becoming a slut (she didnt listen); Dianas brothers, or, as her father calls them, the two assholes; Dianas ex-husband, a lumberjack with three ex-wives, yet hes still the first one she calls when shes in a jam; and Dianas common-law husband, Al, an English professor whos been mistakenly called mentally challenged. Ostensibly organized around the various men in Dianas life, this is really a memoir about what its like to be a modern, smart woman making her way in the world.
Review
Ms. Josephs 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, Josephs 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
Review
Synopsis
Ostensibly organized around the various men in Joseph's life, this is really a memoir about what it's like to be a modern, smart woman making her way in the world.
Synopsis
An Entertainment Weekly "must"-"It's hard to recall another collection of essays, or a memoir, with more natural charm." Surrounded by dysfunctional men-from her fourteen-year-old son to her high-maintenance boss-Diana Joseph did what she had to do: survive. I'm Sorry You Feel That Way is an honest, hilarious, and instantly recognizable memoir of a truly modern woman. Funny, fearless, and warmhearted, it is a portrait of a woman in all her endless complexities and contradictions, and of the people she has come to love in spite of-or rather because of-theirs.
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.