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

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Winning a prestigious award, she agonized over receiving free gifts after the ceremony (It was an excruciating experience. This book contains a series of vignettes depicting and inflating (no doubt) some of the most absurd elements of Pritchett’s life. The book begins as a recollection of a childhood filled with anxiety and grows into an exploration of the joys and intense challenges of professional and family life (and of course their inevitable intersections). A good reminder that perhaps that life isn’t all beer and skittles and rivers of chocolate, regrettably.

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 liked the anecdotal style as I felt it was reflective of an anxious overthinking brain so it felt right. 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? 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. Although the sense of humor is on point, it sometimes feels claustrophobic to put yourself in the author's shoes.

Though I don't have the successful career she has had, a lot of it resonated as she talked about her childhood, family, school, college, personal relationships and professional career and anxiety weaving its way through all of those. I highly recommend the audiobook version because the narration was so natural, it was like Georgia Pritchett was having a conversation with you (even though it was narrated by someone else). I found, though, that the moments of humor helped to temper the more serious stories to make them more palatable. While at times I was thrown by just how jumbled everything feels, and trying to connect these often disjointed fleeting moments together, I also felt in tune with everything that was written.

A truly funny passage can be read, read again and re-read and one can be guaranteed to throw up a guffaw each time. 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.

She is remarkably efficient with her words, which means this memoir is delightfully moreish and fast paced. I saw one review said that this was like bad standup, but for me, it was like I was going through her private Twitter where she was being silly and was oversharing about her life. This was at times funny and relatable, I can definitely see the comparison to Jenny Lawson, and the description that drew me in felt delivered on. To access you ebook(s) after purchasing, you can download the free Glose app or read instantly on your browser by logging into Glose. She addresses all these different aspects of her life with self-deprecatory humour balanced with emotionally charged moments.

This memoir, told in gloriously comic vignettes, is an utterly joyful reflection on living – and sometimes thriving sometimes not – with anxiety. 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. I thought most of the snippets were trying too hard to be funny (NOT succeeding), trying to be offbeat or trite (worrying about being single, dying alone, finding her body weeks later with her cat …).

Some of Pritchett's descriptions of her lowest moments were deeply moving and some of the most realistic descriptions of depression that I have ever read. This memoir is a joyful reflection on just how to live - and sometimes even thrive (sometimes not) - with anxiety.

Overall I am glad I read this and feel like it helped to see anxiety so clearly understood by someone else, as it helped me feel less alone in my anxiety. My Mess is a Bit of a Life by Georgia Pritchett is probably the most fantastic memoir I have ever read. From the earliest recollection, we have feelings of anxiety and fear, as well as a few laughs along the way.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.