My Mess Is a Bit of a Life: Adventures in Anxiety

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This is one of the most wonderfully warm, hilarious and riveting memoirs that I have ever read, of an anxiety ridden Georgia Pritchett making her way through life, personally and professionally, blessed with all the funnies, self deprecating, in the tradition of so much British humour. Although the sense of humor is on point, it sometimes feels claustrophobic to put yourself in the author's shoes. one way of knowing you have crossed from girlhood to womanhood is that men stop furtively masturbating at you from bushes and start shouting things at you from cars. building a career for herself in a deeply misogynistic industry, managing high levels of anxiety since childhood, and dealing with parenthood later on. Louisa Joyner said: ‘Since opening Georgia’s manuscript my life has improved – never mind that the book is brilliant and funny and kind and generous and wise – I felt instantly that I had made a fantastic new friend on the page and I cannot wait to share that joy with a LOT of people.

I raced through it, reading bits to anyone who would listen along the way, and I’m already thinking about a reread! Some of the stories were not particularly funny at all and were instead sad and serious, so if you were looking for something to cheer you up about anxiety, something that holds funny the entire time, this might not be the right collection for you. I thought it might have reflected the authors process with coming to terms with her anxiety with references to instances in her childhood before diagnosis.There are some great running jokes – Bob Dylan’s every appearance made me snort with laughter – but there is also real warmth in the descriptions. A truly funny passage can be read, read again and re-read and one can be guaranteed to throw up a guffaw each time.

Beginning with memories from far back in her childhood through her teenage years up to the present, Pritchett strings together anecdotes and musings about her life. Delightfully offbeat, painfully honest, full of surprising wonders, and delivering plenty of hilarious, laugh-out-loud moments, My Mess Is a Bit of a Life reveals a talented, vulnerable, and strong woman in all her wisecracking weirdness, and makes us love it--and her--too. I hadn’t heard of Georgia Pritchett before, although I now feel ashamed to say that given her impressive CV writing for pretty much every comedy show I could think of from ‘Spitting Image’ to ‘Veep’, ‘Have I Got News For You? Przy tym humor (bywa że ciemny i gorzki) umyka, trudno się utożsamić, nawet w całkiem bliższych tematycznie i "lękowo" anegdotach. But it’s more than just a few laughs; Pritchett is very frank and honest about the highs (working on Veep) and the lows (two young sons on the autism spectrum) of her life, all navigated while managing her own intense anxiety.to embracing womanhood, (One way of knowing you have crossed from girlhood to womanhood is that men stop furtively masturbating at you from bushes and start shouting things at you from cars.

It feels very personal and honest, and I really liked that - although at times I was desperate for a bit more structure and a widening explanation of things. This original, fun, smart, comic and witty memoir is the result, it is largely in the form of anecdotes, vignettes, and thoughts, covering her childhood, where her anxious nature is apparent, family, school, college, personal relationships and her stellar professional career. I found, though, that the moments of humor helped to temper the more serious stories to make them more palatable. Katherine Parkinson of the IT Crowd is the perfect narrator for this book, she truly acts the role she is portraying. This book contains a series of vignettes depicting and inflating (no doubt) some of the most absurd elements of Pritchett’s life.This felt like reading a very chaotic manifestation of someone's thoughts, snippets of memories and emotions over the course of their life.

Georgia invented a superhero alter ego and had an imaginary friend, Samantha, who was never keen on spending any time with her. She addresses all these different aspects of her life with self-deprecatory humour balanced with emotionally charged moments. Oh, and a note to younger women, if you get on an elevator and your much older idol comes in to kiss and fondle you, and to your chagrin, he does it again the next night. It came across less like a memoir of one’s experiences with mental health and their methods of dealing with it, and more as a therapy journal which was published via the author’s prestige, rather than her talent.Pritchett’s series of short, sharp anecdotes are like particularly hilarious and insightful contributions to a conversation over cocktails. If you have anxiety in any form, the sentiments will all seem so familiar – except narrated by someone really, really funny. A good reminder that perhaps that life isn’t all beer and skittles and rivers of chocolate, regrettably. I liked the anecdotal style as I felt it was reflective of an anxious overthinking brain so it felt right.