A Girl Named Zippy

written by Haven Kimmel

Haven Kimmel is a most excellent storyteller. She takes what you might otherwise consider a disjointed jumble of memories about growing up in a podunk Indiana town, and spins them into one of the funniest books I've read in a long time.

I'm not usually that into memoirs, but part of what's so appealing here is that I can relate to some of her childhood experiences. Like Zippy, I grew up in the midwest in the early 1970s, lived in a very small town (still live there, in fact), and was (am) the baby of the family. But even if the genre of thirtysomething midwestern women reflecting on childhood doesn't float your boat, I'm betting you will like this book. It's really funny stuff.

One evening after dinner, I actually read a few pages of this book out loud to my kids and their cousins, because it was just too funny not to share. I won't give away the punchline, but it involved a crazy story about Zippy eating a shocking number of raw carrots (because her mom had - gasp - taken a job outside the home and Zippy was forced to forage for a snack while her mom was at work). The ensuing aftermath was awful and hilarious at the same time.

An interesting wrinkle is that some of the things Zippy writes about are kind of disturbing. For example, she casually observes that there are never family dinner times in her house, that the house is always filthy and has little or no food in it, that her dad sometimes disappears for hours or days with no explanation, and that her mother sits on the couch for days on end, reading science fiction. One can assume from reading this book that Zippy's dad was something of an alcoholic and compulsive gambler, and her mom suffered from bouts of depression, so the homefront was not always blissful — yet all this is presented quite matter-of-factly, even humorously, not in a life-stopping, psychosis-bending, pity-me-because-my-family's-dysfunctional sort of way. I like that, not because I think that family problems should be minimized or swept under the rug, but because all of us (yes, even wholesome midwesterners) can point to a fair bit of dysfunction in our upbringing. But unlike some of the other chick lit out there, Kimmel's memoir doesn't let these darker points define her childhood; they're merely there as part of the fabric.

My friend Lisa, who also read this book, told me that Kimmel has written a follow-on memoir about her mom, called She Got Up Off the Couch - and Other Heroic Acts from Moreland, Indiana. I'll have to check that out.