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

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As Pritchett becomes older and immersed in her career, the reader is treated to some lovely anecdotes about celebrities and working on high-profile comedy programmes. 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 raced through it, reading bits to anyone who would listen along the way, and I’m already thinking about a reread!

Faber Members get access to live and online author events and receive regular e-newsletters with book previews, promotional offers, articles and quizzes. Georgia invented a superhero alter ego and had an imaginary friend, Samantha, who was never keen on spending any time with her. This memoir is a joyful reflection on just how to live – and sometimes even thrive (sometimes not) – with anxiety. This memoir, told in gloriously comic vignettes, is an utterly joyful reflection on living – and sometimes thriving sometimes not – with anxiety. This is something I didn’t think would be possible when I compare my life (pottering round in Cheshire) with hers (pottering round the White House with celebrities).

my toast popped out of the toaster and, simultaneously, a flaming mouse was catapulted out of the other side. I’m always on the lookout for books that make me laugh and – as it made me giggle to myself in Waterstones – this one hit the spot in seconds. 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 always love reading books about anxiety and depression, as it makes me feel that I am not alone when I suffer.

While she achieves professional success her personal life still throws her more curveballs - miscarriages, eventually having two sons (nicknamed 'The Speck' and 'The Scrap') who are diagnosed as being on the Autism spectrum, and then her life partner experiencing a potentially fatal health development. At times, she made me laugh out loud, and I especially enjoyed her account of parenting her sons and her efforts to deal with anxiety. She has suffered some serious loss and faced several challenges but brings humor to sharing many of her experiences. Pritchett’s series of short, sharp anecdotes are like particularly hilarious and insightful contributions to a conversation over cocktails. Like Middlemarch, it has secrets, it has lies and it has an ongoing custody battle between my dog and me for ownership of my Starsky doll.

to an awkward adolescence and then on to adulthood and all the anxiety-ridden problems that brings, it is both poignant and funny. building a career for herself in a deeply misogynistic industry, managing high levels of anxiety since childhood, and dealing with parenthood later on.

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. 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) to becoming a mother (Birth is a beautiful thing, if your idea of beauty is a tractor pulling a combine harvester out of your vagina), Georgia Pritchett’s memoir takes us through a life lived anxiously.Her shyness made speaking problematic, became familiar with writing haikus at her offbeat school, and went to Scotland on family holidays so that their West Highland terrier, Flo, could get back to her roots. Soul-baring yet lighthearted, poignant yet written with a healthy dose of self-deprecation, My Mess Is a Bit of a Life is a tour through the carnival funhouse of Georgia's life, from her anxiety-ridden early childhood where disaster loomed around every corner (When I was little I used to think that sheep were clouds that had fallen to earth. Katherine Parkinson of the IT Crowd is the perfect narrator for this book, she truly acts the role she is portraying.

The vignettes can appear random and difficult to pin down in terms of when the events related happened. Pritchett is self-deprecating to the maximum – For example, I love the way she describes her shoulders as “Muppet Shoulders”.I’ll share with you some of the most memorable moments for me, only a small samples you understand – as I don’t want to spoil the whole book, in case you read it (…. This memoir, told in gloriously comic vignettes, is an utterly joyful reflection on living – and sometimes thriving (sometimes not) – with anxiety. 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.