I Can’t Believe It’s Not Better — Hilarious New Comic Essays by Monica Heisey

Monica Heisey’s fans include Lena Dunham (“Girls”) and Rob Delaney (“Catastrophe”), and, now that I’ve read her new book, me. I Can’t Believe it’s Not Better: A Woman’s Guide to Coping With Life. Heisey is here to counter all of the faux help women get from magazine “tips” and frenemies.

Wisely, she starts with eight essays about food, from passionate love letters to burritos, dips, eating in bed, pizza, and cheese (in iambic pentameter!) she wisely is less enthusiastic on the subject of yoghurt, even the kind that keeps you regular. She has good advice for the office — both how to make it work and what to do when it doesn’t and you get fired. “Like flared jeans or smoking the wrong kind of drugs by accident, getting fired is an unpleasant though not life-ruining occurrence that most of us will experience at some point in our teens or twenties.” She is there to help you get through the thicket of faux-supportive advice from women’s magazines, the ones skewered by the very funny @manwhohasitall twitter feed, with genuine insight and sympathy and some real wisdom. Whether it’s a job interview or trying to decode a text to determine if someone is flirting with you, she is there to tell you she did it worse and make you laugh.