ADULTING FOR AMATEURS

Personal essays humorously document the woes and wonders of life at 43.

“In anticipation of the impending shit show in the pages to follow, I have but one thing left to say, straight from the ciggie-puffing lips of my bestie Samuel L. Jackson as he switched off the Jurassic Park mainframe power: ‘Hold on to your butts.’” In her second essay collection, Gutierrez delves into her experience as a queer, middle-aged mother who strongly identifies with her generational demographic—elder millennial—and comes back with comic gold. The opening essays riff with a mixture of nostalgia and rue on her youth, including titles such as “Ill-Fated Fellatio,” “Plasma Pauper,” and “’Til Death Metal Do Us Part.” Her early days in journalism, her love of the Twilight movies, her career switch to health care—all are fodder for her signature blend of self-deprecatory storytelling, with more jokes per square inch than your average stand-up routine and similar rapid-fire pacing and cuss word punctuation. The latter half of the book gets into her parenting experience, anchored by “Tiny Dictators,” in which she opens with the assertion that “all babies are absolute ass-wipes,” and goes on to wrestle with the dilemma that “you love this person who is essentially holding your very existence hostage more than anything in the world.” After having two biological children, she and her wife went on to foster babies born of mothers addicted to methamphetamine, an impressive challenge whose complexities are skated past a little too quickly, ultimately going on to adopt a third child. As a parent, she has developed a new understanding of what she put her own mother through, dreading that “poetic fucking justice” will soon be served to her on a “piping hot leather lace-up platter,” by which she means a disgusted, toe-tapping teenager in Doc Martens. The high-octane ranting not infrequently gives way to homegrown wisdom: “When I stopped asking myself to be the best mom in the world, I actually became the mom I wanted to be in the first place.” Though we find out two sentences later, “That bitch is messy.”

The Erma Bombeck of her generation, most of whom will love every minute (despite never having heard of Erma Bombeck).