Laughing Without an Accent by Firoozeh Dumas

Book number 10 of the summer! Only 40 more to go...I'm gonna need to pick up the pace a bit, I guess.

I picked up Laughing Without an Accent: Adventures of a Global Citizen by Firoozeh Dumas in an uncharacteristic jaunt over to the non-fiction section of the library. I'm so glad I did though, because I never realized that that's where all the memoirs are located!

Here's what Booklist had to say about it:

Dumas’ builds on her first memoir, Funny in Farsi (2003),offering more amusing tales from her life in this follow-up. Like her first outing, her latest is a collection of anecdotes from different points in her life: stories from her youth in Iran mix with memories of her experiences as a wife, mother, and author. Dumas’ parents remain a big influence in her life, whether she’s dealing with her mother’s frequent and sometimes, in the case of one bright red comforter, unsightly gifts, or trying to understand her father and his brothers’ fixation on The Price Is Right. In one of the funniest chapters, Dumas recalls the time she and her kids decided to try to sell a potato shaped like a cross on eBay, hoping to make a whopping sixty grand.
There’s such warmth to Dumas’ writing that it invites the reader to pull up a seat at her table and smile right along with her at the quirks of her family and Iranians and Americans in general.

I LOVED THIS BOOK. It was absolutely hilarious cover to cover and eye-opening at times as Dumas reveals just how wrong stereotypes can be, telling about her Muslim family that is absolutely nothing like what most Americans would imagine them to be.

Honestly, I must have breezed through this book in about 4 hours. It was fantastic and just so entertaining!

It also struck me on some level because of my ED. Dumas is a woman after my own heart; she loves to learn, to read, to travel, and to open her mind to all views and opinions. She also, as admitted throughout the book, does not have buns of steel, do upper arm exercises, or diet. In fact, she says that she adores most any type of food and there is no dish on this earth of which she will not try at least one bite. She's not overweight, ugly, sad, lonely, childless, unmarried, or anything else Wil often associates with such a lack of restraint with food.

This woman is living my dream. Earning her livelihood by traveling and writing...it's exactly what I would love to do. But this is a dream I can never accomplish if I let these fears hold me back. I know I can be succesful and obtain this life that I envision, but only if I take that final step and jump off the cliff, throw all caution to the wind and LIVE. Live FREE of my ED.

And just to get a little taste of Dumas's flavor, here's a passage I found particularly memorable.

There is always room for you to succeed. Many people spend their lives feeling jealous and resentful of the success of others. They believe that life is a pepperoni pizza and every time someone succeeds, one less slice is available. What they don't realize is that this pizza is part of an all-you-can-eat buffet. There's more pizza coming! In fact, the pizza never ends. Don't waste your time and energy thinking about the other guy and why he got his slice before you did. Yours is in the oven.

So there you go. An all-around really great book. Not too long, unfailingly funny, and highly relevant to today's world. Give it a read, you won't be disappointed.