Crazy Aunt Purl’s Drunk, Divorced & Covered in Cat Hair
by Laurie Perry
Summary
If you’ve ever been dumped, duped, or three minutes from crazy, you’ll love Crazy Aunt Purl, a slightly neurotic, displaced Southerner trying to create a new life after her husband leaves her to “get his creativity back.” (Whatever the hell that means.)
“I pictured my grandmother making hoop-skirted yarn cozies for the toilet paper….I saw my cats wearing knitted hats with lace appliqués. From my vantage point, knitting seemed like 100 percent of some road I did not want to walk down.”
Yet, surprisingly, it’s knitting that saves her and emboldens her to become fully engaged in life again--to discover new friends; to take risks, however scary; and to navigate the ins and outs of the modern dating scene.
“Dating has changed in a decade….”
Excerpt
There are three rules every Southern girl has hammered into her consciousness, and they shape you and haunt you until the day you die.
Cardinal Rule Number One: Mind Your Manners
This is of course the most important rule, especially early on in your upbringing, as it applies to everything from “Watch your mouth” to “Mind your elders,” and encompasses all forms of behavior from “elbows off that table rightnow” to “do not look at me in that tone of voice.” As you get on up in years you learn to mind your manners by not pitching a hissy fit when a smile and firm but pleasant tone will do, and by always being strong and kind, and of course you never smoke standing upright or while wearing your sorority pin. Because that is just tacky.
Cardinal Rule Number Two: Make the Best of a Situation
When delivered by your Uncle Truman or a male teacher of your softball coach, this rule can sound like “Keep your chin up” or “Put your game face on.” Sometimes there’s a bait-and-switch approach, where you may have (in a moment of weakness) confessed some sad or upsetting thing to a willing human listener, and they reply back with a long, often horribly detailed story of the so-and-so girl who faces a far worse and more disastrous situation than you yourself could even imagine, which I suppose is meant to make you feel better about your own pathetic sob story but on me has the opposite effect.
Cardinal Rule Number Three: Always wear clean panties
This particular gem was amended by my mother when I was sixteen, as she warned me in no uncertain terms to always wear clean panties and keep them on.
These rules presented for me a dilemma of decorum at the best of times and a true test of character at the worst of times. My comportment was once again in the crosshairs on the day this story begins, a day like any other, really, a completely normal day.
Although I was a married woman of thirty-three years of age living in cosmopolitan Los Angeles, California, and working in a downtown skyscraper (I work at a bank, but it sounds more glamorous to say “downtown skyscraper”), quite a remarkable departure from my small-town roots, I was not facing the trifecta of Southern Cardinal Rules, brought on by a rather strange and airy sensation in the back regions of my gray pinstripe skirt.
I felt a draft. Back there.
Today, the day of my inconvenient new rear-facing air-conditioning system, was a day of precarious underwear selection. While I had every intention of going home that very evening and facing Mount Washmore, the laundry pile in my bedroom closet, I was currently Making The Best of Things. The wash-day panties I was wearing were nothing more than a string holding together some cotton, and not only was it an unfortunate thong-style contraption, it had the novelty of being green and red because I was on my Christmas undies….
©2007 Laurie Beasley Perry
Reprinted with permission of Health Communications Inc. http://www.hcibooks.com
Reviews
"This hilarious book chronicles the life of a newly divorced woman, as she struggles, dates, and knits her way back to sanity” --Knit.1 magazine
Author's Biography
Laurie Perry has written for the Los Angeles Daily News. She has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Vogue Knitting.