Reflecting on Ian Frazier: A Vague Appreciation

In 1986, Miss Edith was 15 or 16 years old, and in those days Miss Edith bought, on pure whim, an awful lot of books that would prove to be rather important to her decades later.
Ian Frazier's Dating Your Mom was one such book.
I remember buying it at the Yale Co-op; there was no particular reason why. It was cheap, and I suppose I thought it looked funny. I read it and to be honest very little of it appealed to me. But I never tossed the book away or lent it to anyone. I think I had this suspicion that one day, one day, I'd find the book on my shelf again and somehow it would suddenly make sense.
This is, in fact, what came to pass, though I cannot recall exactly when that was. I just know that years later -- probably a decade after I'd first purchased the book -- I was scanning my shelves for something light to read, came across it, and thought, "Oh, what the hell." And suddenly it just... worked.
No, wait. I know that this happened less than a decade after I bought the book, because I remember that it was the first essay in the collection ("The Bloomsbury Group Live at the Apollo") that suddenly struck me as being hysterically funny, and that I was re-reading the piece during the height of my record collecting years. That would make it between 1988 and 1994. Any humor connected to the liner notes of records would have appealed to me tremendously then... and that particular essay of Frazier's is a doozy.

I am thinking about Dating Your Mom and Ian Frazier again because last week at the public library I picked up a new collection of Frazier's essays, Lamentations of the Father, thinking, "Man, I haven't looked at a book by Ian Frazier in I don't know how long." I took the book home and have laughed out loud while reading it at least six times. Additionally, I've been driving Notarius crazy by insisting on reading passages aloud to him at least ten times.

Most of the books I take out from the library are titles that I'm curious to read but don't wish to actually own... but I have a distinct feeling that one of these days I will break down and buy my own copy of Lamentations of the Father. I don't want to bore anyone or risk ruining the book (for those of you who might actually scout out a copy) by quoting from Frazier or going into it much further than this... but please, people. Find the title essay, at least. Read it. And enjoy...

And if you're in a used bookstore and stumble on Dating Your Mom, buy it. Just buy it, all right?
Thank you.