When I opened my mail and saw Suzanne Guillette’s debut work, Much to Your Chagrin: A Memoir of Embarrassment, I sighed inwardly for just a moment. The cover is pink – like, really pink – and I immediately jumped to a series of conclusions having to do with chick lit and beach reads (not that either is necessarily bad, just that they weren’t exactly what I was in the mood for).
But as it turns out, the cover art is the the only – and I mean only – thing that I don’t like about Guillette’s memoir. Chagrin chronicles Guillette’s twenty-ninth year, during which she suffered through a “spectacular implosion” of romantic misfortune while attempting to compile embarrassing stories for what she originally intended to be her first book – a series of short stories titled Oh, Shit.
It’s to our enormous benefit that this book didn’t end up being what Guillette released (largely due to the fact that her romantic relationship with her literary agent fell apart), because Much to Your Chagrin is a work of heart-stirring honesty and a remarkable achievement. Guillette manages to write about both love and heartbreak while gracefully traversing a minefield of potential cliches, and arrives at the conclusion that life’s uncertainties “can bring one to more authentic places.” I am quite simply in awe of a first-time novelist who is capable of tackling such topics with this level of bravery and skill.
This is a wildly entertaining story that at its essence is about a quarter-life crisis, and yet Chagrin achieves the near-impossible for a work in such an over-examined category: it entertains while simultaneously teaching some very important lessons. Guillette has been there, done that, and come out the other side with some very important things to say, and it’s only when you reach Chagrin’s conclusion that you realize that you’ve been taken by the hand and been shown how to make your way through your twenties with wisdom and grace.
Chagrin is sweet, inspiring, and often laugh-out-loud funny, and I can’t imagine that any woman who has ever had her heart broken won’t at times be struck by the sense that she could be reading her own diary. I finished the book yesterday, on a glorious October afternoon, and you know what the first thing I wanted to do when I turned the last page was? Sit down with Guillette, crack open a bottle of wine, and beg her to tell me just one more story…please?
