Jenny Lawson, known around the internet as the Bloggess, is a must-read author for people who appreciate a well-timed taxidermy joke.

Some might call her humor crude, or gently demented, but her previous books, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy, had me cackling in public.

Her most recent book, Broken (in the Best Possible Way), lands a little differently. Lawson still puts her most awkward and shameless foot forward with stories about pet genitals and losing one shoe on an elevator (more than once). However, she shares so much of her pain that I hesitate to suggest this book as straight-up humor.

The chapter addressed to her insurance company is just dark. Another chapter is her treatment diary as she undergoes transcranial magnetic stimulation, which she describes as “an invisible chisel drilling holes into your head while you have an ice-cream headache and also you’re paying for it to happen to you.”

I’d recommend this book to anyone who likes to laugh at life’s bleakest moments, as well as to anyone who’d like to understand how a lifetime of depression and anxiety wears on a person.