Sandra Tsing LohCritiques

I love Sandra Tsing Loh and this book of observations is insightful and hysterical. Her embellishments are always rooted in reality. Her sequence about being audited by the IRS is gut busting. Enjoy this laugh fest!

This book is a series of essays. We have all lived one story but I thought this was a tale of her insignificant life. A few chuckles, a few groans and a lot of skimming the book.

I vote Sandra Tsing Loh to be most likely to be included in my group of friends on a trip to a day spa for wine, brunch and massages. I know she would fit right in with my brilliant witty girlfriends. She is like the friend that gets me and experiences things I experience just a mere two years ahead of me. I am her demographic.

In her latest personal memoir Loh takes on her year of surviving perimenopause hormonal changes while dealing with the fall-out from her divorce (which was famously chronicled in the Atlantic) while dealing with tweens and an aging father. Let's just say I can relate to all of it and it is good to know it will all come out well in the end.

Thank you Sandra--the Gail Sheehy for Generation X.

nonfiction/humor - 55 y.o. half-Asian woman's domestic adventures in Van Nuys/Pasadena, raising a 12 y.o. and 15 y.o. daughters.

Funny and refreshing.

A snarky hilarious memoir about a year in the life of a 55 year old and guess what, being that old doesn’t make adulting any easier. Take for instance your teenagers, they are still a challenge. Most adult readers will find something to identify with in each of the essays. And in a busy life, essays, rather than a connected story are much easier to read and provide laughs.

I was looking for some levity between A Gift upon the Shore and The Scar. I can't say I didn't think that L.A. would be a horrendous place to live. The only writer who has endeared it to me is Francesca Lia Block. Sandra is resigned to it in a snerky, semi-hysterical way. It's mostly funny, but also uncomfortable to watch. Most of the essays are probably magazine pieces and I may have heard some on the Loh Life. It's funnier to hear her read them in the KCRW archives. (January 03, 2004)

No. It gets better as it goes along, but no. I think this probably works as a stand up comic routine, but in print it feels shallow. There are a few good scenes – one in which she flies up to an old friend’s funeral where she knows no one and discovers he was depressed despite the happy Christmas cards. Or when she looks at celadon bowl filled with persimmons in a manicured store and realizes her life is not that. (I think this is what she realizes.) Her father adds grit to this tale but it still feels like a confessional of the utterly self-absorbed elite.
I was reminded of Briget Bardot who at 50 felt the need to publicly proclaim a warning to all women that their bodies would get old. I am paraphrasing here “ I did everything I could for this body and it still got old.”
I can’t decide if that’s funny or sad. Same with Madwoman in the Volvo.

Amusing, wry account of herself and her life, companions, and efforts with all her brutally iconoclastic viewpoint, it does come across a as a bit scraped together so as to pile up enough material to call it a book.½

If you've ever lived in LA, you'll get a great laugh out of this book. Her observations are spot-on and funny!

Sharp and funny. An easy read about a neurotic writer. This was good, but her newer work, "The Madwoman in the Volvo" is much better and tighter.

While there were some bright spots, I liked her most recent book much better, "The Madwoman in the Volvo."

Loving a book, like loving a person, is so much about timing. This book came to me just when I needed laughter, comfort and relief. Loh is smart, sharp, and honest, and "Madwoman" offers quick wit combined with funny-but-true tales.

This is the story of Bronwyn Peters and her boyfriend, Paul, trying to make it in the glamorous city of Los Angeles. Be prepared. This is a very dated (1990s) story. I grew weary of the plenitude of brand-name dropping that went on (Guess?, Porche, Sanyo, Motorola, Kohler, BMW, Berber, Dolce & Gabbana, Wamsutta, Crate and Barrel...to name a few), as well as hot-now celebrity names like David Lynch, Frank Zappa, Malcolm Forbes, and Madonna...
There were definitely times I wanted to slap Bronwyn Peters. Despite listening to NPR and identifying with a Bohemian lifestyle, Bronwyn hungers for the lifestyle of $200 haircuts and Corian counters. She even convinces her struggling writer boyfriend to buy a condo in downtown Los Angeles after they come into a modest amount of money. It is still a place they obviously obviously cannot afford for long. Bronwyn knows full well they are out of their league and yet continues to plays the game to the hilt. Bronwyn's one redeeming quality is her steadfast love for Paul. She stands by him through temptation and failure. In the end, If you Lived Here... is Loh's platform for bringing to the forefront L.A.'s socio-economic class structure. She uses the riots as a backdrop to her commentary on attitudes, prejudices and the simple act of just wanting more.

I do not comprehend this book in the least.... I am unable to fathom, why this unending whining & mindless patter is considered funny.

No, I absolutely did not comprehend what this woman is trying to get across....

So in mimicry of the author:

This is not the first time I have thought this about her writing... In fact, I'm beginning to wonder why I even thought i might want to read this book..... It might have been the cover. In fact I'm sure it was the cover, but not the name on the cover, no that would not be what grabbed my attention. It had to have been the bright yellow background on the cover and the green palm and a gal in a turquoise track suit with a bottle of wodka (I should have stayed with the Tsing Tao) in her hand and pug dog tied to a lamppost (is that what that is?) on the cover.... So maybe it was the cover all along.......

Blah!

This is supposed to be funny? A hormonally unbalanced ranting woman...spewing stream of consciousness?

Chapter one begins with Laura teaching an English class at Mount St. Mary's College...and going off on some tangent about Count Vronsky & Anna Karenina dancing the "MAZURKA" then switching to Mr. Darcy, switching to 40 midlife crisis "THE WHEELS COME OFF", switching to an Ophra book her husband bought her, switching to Miracle Bras & Wonder Bras, switching to her wrinkles...... YAWN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I never got past page 15...and I will tell you it took quite a bit of effort for me to get that far!

When she lost her hormones, it seems as if she also lost her sense of what is considered good writing.

I expected to enjoy this more than I did, because I enjoy her magazine essays. Oddly, even though we learn all about her affair and leaving her husband and children and then the difficulties with her new husband, I felt we never really got to know Loh - perhaps because she was trying too hard to be funny.½

Madwoman in the Volvo is Sandra Tsing Loh’s memoir about her 40s leading up to menopause. This book is uproariously funny in parts but does tend to get a bit somber in the middle when she talks about her father, a man with a ridiculously low heart rate who simply will not give up the ghost. Sandra is the single mother of 2 tween girls, and she miraculously sees a parallel between her daughters’ hormonal conditions and mental state before the onset of menses with her own condition at the other end of the reproductive spectrum. Long story short: if you’re struggling through this passage of life, it gets better. Highly recommended. Read with an empty bladder. Perfect for women’s book clubs. You’ll howl with laughter until you cry.

I really thought I was going to enjoy this book a lot more than I did, especially after hearing Sandra Tsing Loh on NPR, and reading an excerpt of the book in AARP's magazine. It's not that wasn't well written, because it was, but eventually it proved to be not something I was really interested in reading. I guess I thought it would be funnier, and believe me, menopause needs all the humor it can get. Unfortunately, I don't think menopause was the only thing driving Tsing Loh's depression and rage.½

Having reached the age where the word menopause comes up in conversations with friends, Sandra Tsing Loh's memoir The Madwoman in the Volvo: My Year of Raging Hormones caught my eye.

I think there's much more than menopause driving Sandra Tsing Loh's year of raging hormones. While she explores menopause with some actual references to science and respected authors on the subject, Loh's life just seemed to go off the rails as she turns fifty. And menopause was along for the ride. I felt her mood swings, anger and depression had roots in 'pre-existing conditions', if you will. Her affair (Mr.Y) and the dissolution of her marriage (Mr. X) seem to take top billing for much of the book. She also explores her relationships with her children, her aging father, her sibling, friends with seeming candor, but admits, " Like with my middle-aged Volvo, I don't have a temperature or emotional thermostat that actually works."

Although the book is only 288 pages, I had to take a break from the book a few times and return later. Loh's intensity and selfish me, me, me attitude was tiring and quite frankly, grew boring.

I must admit, I had not heard of Loh before picking up this book - she is a broadcaster, writer and performer. But, I was actually quite disappointed (and felt manipulated as a reader) when I reached the end of the book and read the disclaimer....

"Except where noted in the acknowledgments, the characters appearing in this book are composites who are not intended to refer to specific people. While inspired by true events, the actions, scenes, and dialogue in this book have been chosen to illuminate the changes states of mind of the narrator, and are of story-making purposes only."

Fans of Loh will probably enjoy the book.

I read this book as an electronic advance reading copy (e-ARC) provided by Edelweiss, and I have reviewed it on that web site.

This book skews more toward anger and depression than humor, although the author smugly seems to find herself amusing. I am reminded of the false heartiness of Molly Shannon's character, Sally O'Malley proclaiming that she is fifty and fabulous with increasing desperation.

Sandra Tsing Loh's overuse of parenthetical expressions and exclamation points does nothing to mask the ill will she feels toward aging, men, her children, her father, and society in general. Embarking on a "happiness project," for instance, allows her and her friend to spend more time kvetching over the things that annoy them rather than what makes them happy, and none are particularly funny; instead, they speak to a casual (upper) middle class privilege that is infuriating.

The vignettes are meant to tell a story and document a struggle--with her relationships, her family, her body--but the final "triumph" feels inconsequential and uninteresting.

Tsing Loh does make an interesting comparison between prepubescent girls and peri/postmenopausal women, whose feelings and motivations might be more similar than we think. She also references a book called Wisdom of Menopause by Christiane Northrup. One hopes that Tsing Loh has received permission to reproduce the salient points of this book, which sounds far more fascinating and useful than her own work.

Loh is crazy funny, and if you ever wanted to climb inside of the Gen X mind this is the book to do it with. Her SoCal is worlds away from that you see on ET, but that's what makes this book a priceless read. I wished it would never ever end.

This is the third Loh collection I've read, and I subscribe to the Atlantic Monthly, so I already knew I loved her writing and sense of humor. There was much less repetition than I expected -- there would periodically be a paragraph that I recognized from a magazine article, but then it would go somewhere new. Yes, it's self-indulgent and not everyone enjoys that. But observations can be at their zingiest (or most poignant) when you have plenty of personal context. So weird (but neat) to see the same therapist from her early-90s books. Her career experiences do make me glad I never attempted a creative field and thus haven't had the major emotional highs and lows. And it's looking very possible that, like her, I'll end up with two tiny children in my 40s and in the LA area (despite being currently single and in North Dakota) so that connection was neat. All the descriptions of the different parts of Los Angeles (like on the map) went over my head but my SoCal boyfriend found them hilarious.

I love to listen to Sandra Tsing Loh--her short essays/commentaries I've heard on NPR are charming and funny. This was why I read her book and was sorely disappointed. It was a thinly disguised whining about her life as a writer in California, living on her own while her husband is traveling, life with older, overbearing sister. I would have abandoned it, but hoping it would get better. No such luck.

Once you get used to the author's tangent-laden writing style, this is a very funny book about her quest to find a suitable school for her daughter in Los Angeles.½