YOU'RE LEAVING WHEN?

Erma Bombeck meets Dorothy Parker in this topical and often laugh-out-loud funny take on our modern malaise.

Those only familiar with Gurwitch’s tenure (1996-2002) on the TV show Dinner and a Movie will find that it only hinted at the Thurber Award finalist’s deceptively literate talents. Not just an accomplished actress, the author is also a contributor to NPR, and her essays and satire have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the New Yorker, and the Los Angeles Times, among other publications. Despite her becoming modesty, her accomplishments are of considerably greater import than she often allows, even if her performance and writing gigs aren’t always as remunerative as she would like. Gurwitch possesses an appealingly cockeyed sense of humor, and she offers incisive takes on consumer culture and our contemporary confusions and lighthearted (though pointed) opinions on the travails that beset many middle-age women. In a consistently engaging narrative rich with personal anecdotes, the author pokes fun at her misadventures in love, work, and home maintenance, but she also addresses other pressing matters—economic vulnerability in the gig economy, social inequities, raising nonbinary children, friendship, homelessness, wellness fads, the challenges of a life in the arts, and the mysteries of Zoom—with a similarly breezy touch that is surprisingly effective. Her account of her sudden onset of financial and emotional downward mobility is leavened with a sense of the far greater issues faced by others and punctuated with witty asides. Moonlighting as a film critic in what may be the most irresistible chapter, Gurwitch offers a wonderfully droll skewering of such fluffy wish-fulfillment movies as Something’s Gotta Give and Under the Tuscan Sun. Like even the best stand-up routine, not every gag or observation hits the mark, but the signal-to-noise ratio is high.

Gurwitch is a likable exemplar of the I’d-rather-laugh-about-it-than-cry-about-it philosophy.