Looking Back - Blue Jelly: Love Lost & the Lessons of Canning

Looking Back... In an effort to transfer my book journal entries over to this blog, I'm going to attempt to post (in chronological order) an entry every Friday. I may or may not add extra commentary to what I jotted down in these journals.

Blue Jelly: Love Lost & the Lessons of Canning by Debby Bull
Nonfiction - Memoir
1998 Hyperion
Finished in June 1998
Rating: 2/5 (Fair)

Publisher's Blurb:

Former Rolling Stone writer Debby Bull recovers from a broken heart by making jelly. Though her boyfriend dedicates a novel to her and then leaves her in the middle of a party she gives to celebrate its publication, she comes away from it all with more than the bouquet of magazine scent strips that he left behind. In attempting to get rid of his stuff, she discovers the Zen of making jam, and through it the simple pleasure of creating a little world in which things turn out the way they're supposed to. She shares her funny stories of love lost, the twisted road out of her depression and the advice she got from psychics and strangers. Each of the chapters sees her go off in a new direction, looking for help in a different way, from dating again to taking a job, and sampling all the new cultural landscape has to offer to heal, from seeing a shrink to taking a seminar with a relationships guru.

After years in New York and a move to Montana, Bull finds herself suddenly drawn back to her childhood home of Wisconsin, where "USA Today has just announced in a colorful pie chart that the people there are the only ones in the country who are fatter and drinking more beer than they were ten years ago." Bull delights in taking aim at all the celebrities who've crossed her path as a journalist, tossing their worst moments into the stories wherever they help.

Wise, funny, and enlightening in spite of itself, Blue Jelly argues that depression, when it sends you off on adventures like these, is very good for the soul. Plus, there are 15 real canning recipes.

My Original Notes (1998):

Didn't do anything for me. A quick, but somewhat dull read.

I met the author in Cleveland at a small book conference. She's very witty, but the book was a disappointment.

My Current Thoughts:

I enjoyed meeting the author at a book conference in Cleveland in 1998, but had never heard of her and wasn't impressed with her book. I do remember that she was quite humorous. She, Lorna Landvik and Mary Doria Russell had us in stitches, they were so funny! Too bad her book wasn't.