At frist I thought the memoir was all about suburban life and the author's dissatisfaction within it, but the essays would be funny to anyone, not just a wife and mother living in a comfy if stifling lifestyle. Her stories about using a "destressor" in the carpool lane, finding a spirit animal in therapy, and camping in a van are so funny and brutally honest. She makes fun of a lot of life situations, like growing apart from her husband after 20 years of marriage and reserving all her attention/time for her son now, the scary experience of sending her son to camp, straightening her hair in a 6-hour process, and all the other ways we're human.

“The Slippery Year” caused me no end of embarrassment. When I was reading it outside of my office building one afternoon, I must have looked like a complete idiot. From my shoulders shaking as I tried to disguise my laughter to having to wipe my eyes every so often, I must have looked like a person who’d completely lost control.

OK – I realize how hyperbolic that last sentence was – but this book was really funny!!! Laugh out loud, snorting and crying funny. Granted, my life is pretty similar to that of author Melanie Gideon, but I still think anyone with a sense of humor would enjoy this book.

“Yes, we are stupid people that live at the top of a Canyon. Yes, we live in the Oakland Hills, and yes, these are the same Oakland Hills that were ravaged in the Oakland Hills Firestorm of 1991 that at its peak destroyed one house every eleven seconds. But not our hill. Not our canyon. That is what I say when Mr. Fire Captain comes to dinner.”

“He shakes his head and says, ‘If there’s a fire just get out.”

“Out to where?” I ask.”

“Just grab Ben and run down the street.”

“Well, run where?”

“Away from the ________ fire,” he says. “Is there something wrong with you?”

There’s nothing wrong with Gideon. She’s like most of the other mothers, wives, women I know. In this book, subtitled “A Meditation on Happily Ever After”, the worry, love, despair, exhaustion and joy of life come shining through.

Her humor is very self-deprecating and she rarely hides that which she considers her flaws. Though at times she doubts herself as a wife and mother, the fierce love that she feels for her family blazes through. In fact, I am realizing as I write this, that I marked far more touching passages than funny ones, even though I started off this review by mentioning the humor.

“There’s this strange phenomenon. An hour after you’ve put your children to sleep, the ways in which you have wronged them sprawl out on your chest, all two hundred and fifty pounds of them, and suck the breath right out of you. It works the same way with gratitude. An hour after your family has left the house, you love them with a piercing intensity that was nowhere to be found when you were scraping egg yolk off their breakfast dishes. Your hope is to one day feel this way about them when they’re in the room. This is a pretty lofty goal.”

And, “Do you know sometimes when you look at your kid and it’s like his face has run away? Suddenly he no longer belongs to you? And for a moment you can imagine him free in the world, living, loving and dying without you ever knowing him? Without you ever having spoken one true thing to him?”

Balanced with things like this anecdote about her 9-year old son at the airport:

“You go first,’ I whisper to Ben. “And try and act normal.”

“He hesitates and I give him a little shove and he scampers through the metal detector, looking both terribly guilty and terrified, as if he’s about to be zapped with 1,000 volts of electricity.”

“Phew,’ he says, having made it through.”

“He would make a very bad drug mule.”

Gideon certainly speaks my language…sarcastic, ironic, funny and intensely loving. Her reflections on marriage, motherhood and being a sister and a friend truly hit home. She does all this in a way that made me laugh…and then catch my breath when she says something that strikes right to the heart of human relationships.

“I look at my husband and I see him. I mean I really see him. Something falls away, and all the men he’s been in the years I’ve known him pulse beneath the surface of his face: the twenty-four-year-old who so staggered me with his animal grace, the thirty-three-year-old father tenderly cupping the head of his newborn son, the forty-year-old who taught himself to surf because he needed a new challenge; he needed a religion.”

Last thing? On the funny? When you get to the part about “The Ninemandments”? Either go somewhere private or grab some Kleenex. Trust me. ( )