Straight Up & Dirty by Stephanie Klein ( #7, Nonfiction)

Oh what felicity it was for me to find this book in a closet of orphaned beach reads at our house in Costa Rica. I nearly jumped for joy. Yes, I am a fan of Stephanie Klein's website, Greek Tragedy--have been for a couple years--but for some reason I never really felt the need to purchase her memoir. Perhaps I sensed how much of it I had already read by obsessively checking her blog. Klein's blog is the only one I started reading and was so intrigued and fascinated by her stories that I went back to the beginning posts and read everything she had written. If you don't know her story, it is a compelling one.

I wouldn't put this book into the hands of any men because her stuff is on the girly side, but it is pretty hilarious at times. Becky gave me many a strange look as I sat next to her in the pool reading Klein's tell-all memoir. It is definitely not for those who blush easily. The title really means what it says: straight up and dirty accounts of Klein's bad marriage to a cheater and her subsequent struggle to put a horrible relationship behind her and find herself again. It is inspirational, if not a bit tedious. A lot of sections seemed like they could have been trimmed, as there are countless passages where she tells us the same things, over and over again. But those scenes are interspersed with the juicy scenes that make you crack up--like the time she let out a huge fart in front of her boyfriend for the first time and then got what she calls 'rhea, which is short for diarrhea, right before running a race with him. Good stuff.