BookLife Review: Someone Will Be With You Shortly: Notes from a Perfectly Imperfect Life (Lisa Kogan, author) by Carol O’Day
Non-fiction, essays, humor, O Magazine contributor, Manhattan, parenting, romance, body image, friendship, working parents, extended family, long-distance relationships, village of women
Lisa Kogan is an essayist, humorist and a regular contributor to O Magazine. Someone Will Be With You Shortly: Notes from a Perfectly Imperfect Life is a collection of essays that ruminate on middle age, parenting, partnership, self-image, body image, friendship, living in Manhattan and the piecing together of a life as a working woman and parent. Kogan’s writing is witty, at times laugh-out-loud funny, and sometimes so dense with humor that its prose requires a second pass. She is self-deprecating and employs a multitude of metaphors to convey her angst. Her humor is born of both her ability to face her own shortcomings head-on and to unearth fresh (though extreme) similes and metaphors to express her experiences.
At the time she wrote the book, Kogan was 49-years old, and had a seven year-old daughter who is the emotional center of her universe. The travails leading her to motherhood were many and complex. She suffered her share of romantic frogs along her path to career success, and met her life partner, Johannes, in her late thirties. Her partnership with Johannes is unconventional. He lives three quarters of the year in Zurich where he raises a son. He and Kogan commute very long-distance to share a life and co-parent their daughter, so Kogan operates as a single parent more often than not. Though set in Manhattan and peppered with references to her Russian and Jewish heritage, Kogan identifies themes that speak to the challenges faced by any parent and the universal Everywoman. She is at once overwhelmed, witty, cranky, flawed and like the friend you enjoy most sitting with for hours to unburden yourself of the frustrating experiences of living and relating.
Perhaps what is most refreshing about Kogan’s writing is her candor. She writes openly about the fact that she was diagnosed with diabetes while pregnant and kind of resented that she had to limit her intake of fettuccine alfredo, that the village that raises her child includes two amazing caregivers and their extended families rather than one at-home mom and a cadre of available aunts and uncles, that she gained weight and got lazy about her appearance after he daughter was born, that she is terrible at throwing parties because her perfectionism obscures the priority of enjoying the company, that during her single years she preferred volunteering at a community kitchen on Thanksgiving to spending it with her family-a conglomerate of married couples with children who all had opinions on her single, childless life and sat her at the kids table, and that she is a bit of hermit who doesn’t want to travel or even often leave her apartment on a weekend. Her gift is her ability to convey her own flaws and her observations of the world in unexpected language and metaphors. The book’s title “Someone Will Be With You Shortly” is not even one of her own witticisms; it is a clever statement by her obstetrician when Kogan was demanding to know how much longer before her baby would be born. She describes the multitude of women just barely keeping their heads above water as working mothers as women who “feel victorious when they manage to buy stamps.” An avowed romantic, she acknowledges that her partner Johannes is not a grand gesture fellow, but that she finds his version of romance equally potent–when confronted with cranky Lisa or is shocked by seeing her disastrous haircut or comes home to find her ill, unshowered, mired in several days old sweats surrounding by used tissues and remnants of snacks, he follows his errant suggestion that perhaps she take a shower with the most romantic question he could ask her, “Are you losing weight?”
Betwixt and between its dense witticisms and the occasional too-long, self-deprecating tirades, Kogan is reflective. Somebody Will Be With You Shortly is written in the Erma Bombeck-esque style that characterizes her essays in O Magazine. But the book is not just funny. It is deeply reflective about the challenges of daily living and aging we all face. Like the best humor, it arises from deeply held and shared truths. We laugh because we recognize the pathos in Kogan’s writing. We all know a prickly relative, the imbalance of roles in a partnership and in parenting, the daily struggle to both nurture family relationships and make a living. We understand that life is messy, people make massive missteps and are sometimes lazy, unkind or self-centered. It is a plea for tolerance, a nudge to appreciate the simple joys already present in our too-busy, all-too-short lives and to realize that gifts and blessings often appear when and from whom you least expect, and a reminder to to slow down, to smell the roses, or the chocolate and fettuccine alfredo, as the case may be.
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