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SHAREAsk the queen of female humor bloggers about the secret to her success, and she’ll start talking mice. Stuffed mice. Jenny Lawson has a bunch of them in her rural central Texas home office. “When I started I was talking about things people weren’t talking about,” she says. “Like Sasquatch and taxidermied mice wearing people clothes.”
Fans of The Bloggess, Lawson’s award-winning blog, know all too well of the 38-year-old’s obsession with taxidermy. But it’s not just the mice they come for. Lawson is hilarious. Her off-kilter commentary on marriage and motherhood, her weird stunts and her brushes with celebrity—such as her one-sided public feud with William Shatner—have made her an Internet star.
Since she launched The Bloggess in 2006 she’s attracted millions of page views a month, more than 200,000 Twitter followers and fans as fabulous as Jeri Ryan and Felicia Day and authors Neil Gaiman and Augusten Burroughs. Vanity Fair called Lawson “hellaciously funny,” Marie Claire said she’s “snarky, witty, totally inappropriate,” and Burroughs, the author of Running With Scissors, said, “When I was funny, I wasn’t this funny.”
Lawson gives plenty of credit to her readers. “I have incredibly funny commenters,” she says. “The comment section is invariably funnier than the post itself.”
It’s not a knock against Lawson to say she’s right. According to Alexa.com, the site’s visitors are college-educated moms ages 35-44, and judging by their comments they could be humor writers, too. The Bloggess is where the fun moms are.
This week Lawson enters the literary world with Let's Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir). Like The Bloggess, the book mixes mortifying real-life experience with hilarious running commentary.
DAME spoke with Lawson while she paced the rooms of her house, stopping only to dust her taxidermied animals, including her famous mice.
For more Lawson check out The Bloggess or follow her on Twitter.
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