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Lopsided |
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| Book: Hardcover | 5.51 x 8.26in | 224 pages | ISBN 9780670019281 | 12 Jun 2008 | Viking Adult | 18 - AND UP |
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Lopsided is not your ordinary cancer memoir. Meredith Norton chronicles every step of her experience, starting with her bizarre symptoms while living in Paris to moving back home to California and living with her compulsive parents and their five television sets. Irreverent and incredibly funny, Norton rails against self-pity and victimhood and rants about the innumerable copies of Lance Armstrong's cancer survival book pressed on her by well-meaning family and friends.
Alongside the harrowing portrait of her treatments, Norton offers equally amusing memories from her offbeat life. We see her childhood time during a somewhat racist ski trip, a family reunion at a Florida alligator farm, and her life in a tree house with a neighbor, who, despite being vegan, hates mice enough to taxidermy them into miniature versions of racecar drivers, Jesus, a UPS delivery man, and Sally Jesse Raphael.
Like David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, Norton's razor-sharp wit is at once riotous and excruciating. Lopsided is the remarkable debut of a masterful humorist.
“…a truly elegant memoir…Norton is terrific at narrating the physical slapstick of battling this disease. But She’s even better on the arrogance and pretense the cancer reveals…she’s fresh and adorable, and you hope she sticks round to produce at least another dozen surly, lovely books.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“By including touches of wit and sarcasm, Norton strikes a successful balance between light and heavy, keeping her audience consistently engaged.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“If you seek to be moved — to laughter, that is — look no further than newbie Meredith Norton’s memoir, Lopsided: How Having Breast Cancer Can Be Really Distracting. Her victimless approach doesn’t sugarcoat the experience but rather brings to light hilarious universals (e.g., constant Lance Armstrong mentions from friends and family).”
—Daily Candy
“Lopsided is fantastic. I read it in one sitting, and it completely swallowed me up. For one entire day, a girl I don’t know and never met became my best friend, and I have not been able to stop thinking about her since. LOPSIDED is powerful, funny, courageous, and moving, but most of all, it is human.”
—Laurie Notaro, author of The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club
“...wise, humorous memoir...Her disarming frankness renders the book less a cancer survival guide and more a lovably unfiltered e-mail from a hilarious friend. There has not been a funnier, more honest cancer account in recent memory.”
—People
“I hope to encounter this clear, incisive, highly amusing voice again. Soon.”
—Orlando Sentinel
“Norton is one plucky dame, and she displays a sharp eye for the human condition...[she]calls herself a storyteller, and the tale she has crafted from a life-altering event is indeed hard to put down”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[Lopsided] crackle[s] with heartfelt intensity and irreverence.”
—Booklist
“Her tone may be facetious, her language colorful, and her distractions gritty (readers will gasp at the taxidermy activities of a former neighbor), but her view of cancer (funny and irreverent) and her place in the world (she found herself “waiting for a miracle. Not a miracle to save my life, but the miracle to make something of it”) will make readers stand up and cheer. Highly recommended…”
—Library Journal
“Meredith Norton gives marvelous new meaning to the phrase ‘a sick sense of humor.’ And her lippy, lovable, sharp-shooting story will find your heartstrings by way of your funny bone. This isn’t Chicken Soup for the soul; it’s Tabasco. Fans of David Sedaris should fall to their knees and worship this book. LOPSIDED is, hands down, the best new memoir that I’ve read in ages.”
— Koren Zailckas, author of Smashed
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