Amazon’s free Super Saver shipping has got to be their most clever sales tactic ever. But I’m glad for it because otherwise I probably would never have ordered Pamie’s second book, Why Moms Are Weird. I loved Why Girls Are Weird. I even wrote to Pamie about it (something I hardly ever do, but I’d read her blog for a while and felt I knew her a bit) because it resonated with me so much.

Why Moms Are Weird didn’t resonate with me so much, exactly, but it gave me another opportunity to hear Pamie’s writerly voice, to sort what comes from the author and what comes from the characters, and to appreciate her gift for creating fiction that inhabits the world so much that it seems like her characters must exist somewhere, that they’re people I might actually know, even though I don’t know anyone quite like them.

Pamie (and Sars and the rest of the TwoP and related crew) have for a long time created a space on the internet where it was okay to be smart, to be a geek about some things (even pop culture), to have juvenile humor and grown-up seriousness side-by-side, to be unsure of yourself and sometimes not like yourself very much but to go on being yourself anyway, and to share it out there so we all know we’re not alone.

And I don’t imagine that we’re all losers. Sure, I sometimes say I’m hideous and dorky, but I assume we’re all operating under the same notion that in real life we’re basically interesting, attractive people. Online we can be honest and tell each other that we’re scared of looking like idiots. —Why Girls are Weird, p. 206

They made the internet awesome and human at the same time.

And it’s neat to have a new little capsule of that in book form.