There is something wrong with Jonathan Tropper.
There is something very wrong with Jonathan Tropper. But I like it.
This month at Towne Book Center & Cafe we’re discussing This is Where I leave You by Tropper. This past year we’ve read two or more books about death, dying, and funerals, and I was spent. So when it was time to read this, I was slightly peevish about its prospects.
Turns out I was freakishly incorrect.
To be sure, someone dies in the book, there’s a funeral, and there’s crying. Aside from those aspects, this title is nothing, I repeat NOTHING like a typical burying a parent type of book.
Why?
Because there is something wrong with Jonathan Tropper. Tropper is kind of the male Jewish Jenny Lawson type of person: if something can go freakishly awry, it will. And you (the main character) won’t be the least bit surprised by it.
Where do I begin?
The main character’s father dies and all of the adult siblings must meet up to attend the funeral and all of the accompanying social situations that brings. What you don’t expect is for Judd to be cuckolded and for everyone to know about it. You don’t expect the presiding rabbi’s name to be Rabbi Boner.
Get where I’m going with this?
Yep. It gets CRAZIER. But NO SPOILERS FOR YOU!!
I just found out that the movie version of this crazy (cray cray as my 16 yr old says) book comes out next September.
The irony of the situation on Planet Pam is that I read Jenny Lawson’s book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, on the train last winter to attend my father in law’s funeral. I giggled the whole way through the book. It lightened my spirits and I shared some of the wackier bits with my bereft husband during our quieter moments in the hotel. It felt sacrilegious and slightly dirty.
That’s how I felt reading This is Where I Leave You: sacrilegious and slightly dirty.
There’s something wrong with Jonathan Tropper.
I love it.