Sometimes a person needs a light read. A fun read. A pick it up and put it down (finished in a day) read. This book is all of these things, but it also carries an important message in an accessible format. We meet many people in our lives and love many be eternal or fleeting. Regardless of the time that love is shared, or held on to, the depth, the intensity, the interwoven sense of purpose can vary. We may not always love the person that we love now. We may not always remain with the person that we love and yet we may love them forever. I, personally, love many people. I love them in different ways. I love them to different depths. I'm the type that always loves. If I love you today, I will love you tomorrow. There is nothing that you can do to stop that love. I may not like you if you hurt other or myself, but love and like are not the same thing. Like can change; love remains. Needless to type, I do not throw the word Love around lightly. I do not tell my husband that I love him every time that we part: in person, on the phone, into slumber land. I tell him that I love him when I am consciously aware of how present that love is, when I am embraced and caught up in it, when I am fully in that moment. This can occur when I see him act kindly in a moment when I may not, when I remember something that he has said that I may not have appreciated fully at the time, when I hear about another relationship, another partner, that purposely does something hurtful and realize that Jim is such a good person, when I remember past relationship, past hurts and know that he is kind. Sometimes this can happen simply because he squeaks when he laughs or because his dark lashes frame his clear blue eyes in a certain light. There is a depth to that love. Intensity. A texture. Love goes beyond people, for me anyway, and encompasses ideas. Sometimes, I have learned, that people are mere reflections (positive or negative) of the ideals that what frame them within. Sometimes they are not the people that we imagine them to be – fairly or unfairly.This story reminds me that there are different kinds of love and that time and changes in relationship status do not diminish it. I loved some that came before JIM. I still love some that hurt me badly – badly, but this is a different kind of love than what I share with my incredible husband (who does leave balls of socks all over the house and wonders why the dogs eat them). I told him last night that there is nothing in the world that I would trade for him and there is nothing, nothing that could ever compare to him, but this incredible love does not remove the past loves (the past-current loves) and that is what I liked most about this book.This book shares the story of a "larger woman" and her search for love from herself, from partners, from day-in-day-out-family, from her father (post painfully reminiscent of my own life), from her dog, and from society. She struggles, she shares humor and rage. She shares hope and she embraces – she embraces.Memorable passage (and words to live by): "I will love myself, and my body, for what it can do-- because it is strong enough to lift, to walk, to ride a bicycle up a hill, to embrace the people that I love and hold them fully, and to nurture a new life. I will love myself because I am sturdy. Because I did not--will not--break." (p365)
Good in Bed is misleading. It is not either good or set in a bed. Had someone told me this, I probably would have not read this 370 page book.I digress. The book's style really got old soon. It was like a diary of a mad woman. I did this, I did that, I went to lunch, I picked up my mail, little details that the reader could care less about. All this time spent on talking about the small things could have been spent describing the environment and characters with more light.Anyway, the main character, Cannie is a plus sized woman that did not have the best childhood. She is educated but, given the emphasis on her upbringing, makes a bunch of dumb decisions that put her in a socially unacceptable place. I cringed as I read and discovered this mad woman making mistake after mistake without any of the supporting characters spotting on. All in all, this book felt like Sex in The City meets Diary of a Mad Black Woman... and the bastard child was not good. Reading on Wikipedia about this book, I learned that this is supposed to be chick lit. What message does this give young women? Shitty childhood? Go to an expensive college, resent your father, enjoy some debt. Be in a relationship with a pothead for three years, get knocked up out of wedlock? Treat your mother's lover with out giving them a chance? Do nothing significant to control your weight but jump from a crash diet to another, never bothering to control your intake and make time to exercise. OK, this review, is sort of all over the place. I'm just frustrated that I wasted three days reading this to get a few giggles out. Totally not worth it.
What do You think about Good In Bed (2002)?
I started this book thinking I was reading Chick Lit or its older sister Women's Fiction. It soon became clear to me that Good In Bed is literary fiction. Jennifer Weiner has been very vocally involved in a discussion lately about how women writers are treated by reviewers, and now I can see why this is an issue for her. Cannie Shapiro, Weiener's protagonist in this book, is wrestling with relationship and family issues, much like male characters in novels written by men. Cannie also has body image issues, but let's parallel that with men in books who talk about their substance abuse or their penis. Cannie is a writer, as many, many male protagonists are. So, why is this book not considered in the same league with a Jonathans Lethem or Franzen novel? Is it because Cannie has a sense of humor? Because she talks about women-y things like her vagina and her fertility? Or is it because she is named Jennifer and not Jonathan? I am thinking I know the answer to this question, although what I really want to do is put my hands over my ears.Compare this book to Gary Shteyngart's Super Sad True Love Story, which is cute and juvenile and funny and makes a dystopian point about how we relate to each other. No one called that Boy Lit or Guy Fic or Man's Prose even though Shteyngart's main character watched his girlfriend buy underwear at Juicy Pussy. So if Gary and Jonathan want me to read about their drug binges and their oral sex, they have to read about our periods and our nights of tequila and chocolate.
—Carol
I have to be honest and say that this book is not my cup-of-tea. So, consider that when you see the one star rating. I don't like reading a book with what feels like a lump in my throat the whole time. I like a release from the pressure at least every once in awhile. I didn't particularly like Cannie and yet I disliked what happened to her. I ended taking this book to work and putting it in the 'free if you want pile'. Someone I worked with picked it up, read it, and gave it a few more stars than I did; however, not a big 'must read' rating. Jennifer Weiner is a good writer; I just wanted something else. I'm a nurse and I get enough sadness in my life as it is. I have another book by her that I don't think I'll ever read.
—Lisa Kay
Good in Bed by Jennifer Weiner is a total beach read. It’s got a sassy protagonist Cannie, her tell all ex-boyfriend, her hot lawyer bestie, her newly lesbian mom, her underhanded co-worker, and so on. The writing is sharp and funny and the characters drawn with broad easy strokes. Philadelphia (one of my favourite cities) is painted deliciously, and the woes of the larger woman are something I am most sympathetic to. The world is not nice to fat people of either gender, and it’s apparently still ok to make fun of them or expect them to be nice and funny in return. I would have given this book a couple more stars if it had not been for the truly puzzling undercurrent of anti-lesbianism that runs through the entire thing. Cannie’s mother has what looks like a terrible marriage to a man (who is by all accounts a shitty father too), and after struggling through a divorce and single-motherhood, she finds love and happiness in the arms of “the Dread Lesbian Tanya.” I. kid. you. not. This book is set in the late 90s or early 2000s, but it feels like those parts were written by a 12 year old in the 1980s, when it was acceptable to talk about homosexuality but homosexuality wasn’t acceptable. For e.g. when someone tries to defend her mother’s choices, Cannie says, “But my point is you don’t really know any gay people. So how can you assume it’s such a terrific thing for my mom? That I should be happy about it?”Just replace “gay” with any other term and it’s clear how prejudiced this character is. And it just keeps going on and on. And anyway, how do two people go to college in America in the 90s and not know any gay people? Like not even one between the two of them? If Cannie had somehow come to terms with her mother’s “inappropriate life,” and apologised for the incessant homophobia, *maybe* I’d be ok with the book, but as it is, she didn’t (although Tanya ends up barely tolerated), and in the end, I kind of hated the book, the protagonist, and even the author. For as staunch a feminist as Ms. Weiner is, and someone who stands up for women in literature, I am really surprised and baffled by this undercutting. It just doesn’t make sense. The other irritating part of the book was a completely unbelievable friendship with a major movie star who gets Cannie’s script made into a movie. As a writer, I have a knee jerk reaction against these easy windfalls. I’d have liked a non-homophobic Cannie to win, for a fat girl to beat out the others, but this was too much for me. I enjoy the easy beach novel every so often, but I’m afraid I’ll be sticking to her essays from now where she isn’t so damningly discriminatory.
—Abeer Hoque
