A number of us began reading the manuscript right away, and
before long giggles were erupting from behind computer screens all over the
office. Here was a story that was completely unrelatable to all of us – given
that no one at Picador grew up in rural Texas the child of an over-zealous
taxidermist, nor has ever mistaken a marriage proposal for an attempted murder /
sent themselves a cobra in the post / had an arm stuck up a cow (or at least,
none of my colleagues has admitted to any of these things). And yet, amidst all
the glorious weirdness and irreverence and insanity, this was a story that every
one of us could relate to – it is a memoir of childhood, of shamefully awkward
teenage years, of getting older, falling in love, going through rough patches
and learning to find joy in the everyday.
We all agreed that this was a
brilliantly one-of-a-kind voice and one of the funniest – if not the
funniest – books we’d ever read, and it left us feeling tingly with
excitement about getting it into the hands of as many readers as possible. So,
with mere months to go before the US publication, we acquired UK rights and got
cracking.
At time of writing, we are a week
away from publication on this side of the Atlantic. A great number of wonderful
things have happened to this book along the way. It has been praised by many
bestselling writers, including Neil Gaiman, Jen Lancaster and Augusten Burroughs
(who said ‘Even when I was funny, I wasn’t this funny’). It has been pre-ordered
in staggering quantities by the hundreds of thousands of people who read Jenny’s
award-winning blog (thebloggess.com). It has hit the number one slot on the
New York Times bestseller lists in its first week on sale in the US. But most wonderfully of all, it
has been getting the most deliriously ecstatic responses from booksellers and
readers, both those who have been fans of the author for some time and those who
have never read her before. A number of these people have said that they laughed
so hard whilst reading that strangers edged away from them on public transport.
One person fell off a chair. If that’s not the sign of a good book, I
don’t know what is.
I really hope that when you open the
pages of LET’S PRETEND THIS NEVER HAPPENED you’ll feel the same thrill of
discovery that we all did. And if you fall off your chair, too – well, even
better.
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