Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair: The True-Life Misadventures of a 30-Something Who Learned to Knit After He Split
Laurie Perry
Language: English
Pages: 138
ISBN: 2:00268427
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
If you've ever been dumped, duped, or three minutes from crazy, you'll love Crazy Aunt Purl. Side-splittingly funny and profoundly moving, Drunk, Divorced, and Covered in Cat Hair is the true-life misadventures of Laurie Perry, aka Crazy Aunt Purl, a slightly neurotic, displaced Southerner trying to create a new life after her husband leaves her to 'get his creativity back.' (Whatever that means.) But will she get her groove back in a tiny rented apartment, with a mountain of boxes, visible panty lines, and a slight wine-and-Cheetos problem?
"I was a thirty-something woman living alone with four cats. I was probably going to be divorced. I was on the short bus to crazy. I pictured my grandmother making hoop-skirted yarn cozies for the toilet paper. I pictured myself making doilies for furniture that I did not own. I saw my cats wearing knitted hats with lace appliqués. From my vantage point, knitting seemed like 100 percent of some road I did not want to walk down."
Yet, surprisingly, it's knitting that saves her and emboldens her to become fully engaged in life again--to discover new friends; to take risks, however scary; and to navigate the ins and outs of the modern dating scene.
"Dating has changed in a decade. Now there is a higher chance of meeting someone who has an internet porn addiction than someone who has a job. In Los Angeles, your dinner companion might have served time in Pelican Bay or run a meth lab. Or, worst of all, he might spend all night talking about his agent, his craft, and what it means to grow as an actor. Then he'll ask you to read his screenplay."
And such is life in this quirky, irreverent memoir, a spin-off of the blog phenomenon, www.crazyauntpurl.com, one of the most successful online diaries in history, exploding to an international fan base of enthusiastic readers. But don't worry, you don't have to knit to love Aunt Purl. You just have to know what it feels like to have loved, to have lost, or to have taken a leap of faith. We've all been there: Pass the wine.
use all that superstitious intuition to find a perfect fit. I love my gut feelings. I thought I chose a man who was solid and stable and genuinely seemed to love me. I didn’t rush into anything, in fact I had spent years and years looking for him, The One. I probably began searching for The Man I Would Marry even before I was old enough to date. I hadn’t been impetuous like some of my girlfriends and married right out of high school, even though I was madly in love with my sweetheart, Matt. He
wrapped in bacon. These are sustaining foods for trying times. Where I’m from, happy events are celebrated with food, but sadness is what brings out a true hunger. Southern funerals are well known for their wide assortment of cheese-covered casseroles and all sorts of creations topped with French’s French Fried Onions, bread crumbs, or crushed cornflakes. You would be surprised at the large number of comforting casseroles that spring to mind when one is being jettisoned by her betrothed. You
toe. Let some stranger buy those boots and the spider family inside—one dollar, please! When I had moved into this house I hadn’t been willing to get rid of a single thing, as if holding on to objects could somehow save enough of my old life to be resurrected, marriage and all. After a few weeks of living in this little firetrap, I knew it was a physical necessity to pare down (I kept losing track of my keys, my cats, my shoes), so I got rid of what I could. But for a long time I still held on
failure. My car got stolen from the subway parking lot on the day of our wedding anniversary. Then Charlie went to Italy without me; was a girlfriend keeping him warm? Los Angeles erupted in the worst fire season in a decade, and I sat out on the patio each night under the burned black-orange sky, smoking even though the air was so thick with ash it was redundant. Just inhale. The owner of our beloved condo sent me a registered letter that he was selling the property, and I had a few weeks to
that she’d have to wear forever and secretly hate me for giving her on Mother’s Day, a holiday meant to honor her, not torture her. I spent the greater part of my formative years making my parents “artsy” stuff like:• Ages 3-5: Macaroni-encrusted pencil holders, macaroni collages, macaroni anything. (It was the ’70s.) • Ages 6-7: Lumpy ashtrays for my family of nonsmokers. • Age 8: One nature collage made of poison ivy, poison oak, and sumac. Boy, was that one a hit, especially when I was