She Drives Me Crazy: Three Favorite Essays

By Celia Rivenbark

From the bestselling, award-winning author of You Can't Drink All Day If You Don't Start In The Morning among others, comes three wickedly irreverent essays that will resonate with women, mothers, and girlfriends everywhere.

In these essays, Celia Rivenbark reviews the many oddities in stranger-than-fiction news story, chronicles her transition into the Twitter-sphere, and laments a missed opportunity to be a guest on a certain national talk show.

These essays and many more are featured in You Don't Sweat Much for a Fat Girl, available August 2011.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Jul 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781429956659

Celia Rivenbark

Celia Rivenbark is the author of the award-winning bestsellers Stop Dressing Your Six-Year-Old Like a Skank; Bless Your Heart, Tramp; Belle Weather; and You Can’t Drink All Day If You Don’t Start in the Morning. We’re Just Like You, Only Prettier won a Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance (SIBA) Book Award for nonfiction and was a finalist for the James Thurber Prize for American Humor. Born and raised in Duplin County, North Carolina, Rivenbark grew up in a small house “with a red barn out back that was populated by a couple of dozen lanky and unvaccinated cats.” She started out writing for her hometown paper. She writes a weekly, nationally syndicated humor column for the Myrtle Beach Sun News. She lives in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Book preview

She Drives Me Crazy (Shaving Time Off the Commute)

My friend Randy is ’bout to lose his religion over his new car.

A good Southern boy, Randy was tickled with his car at first because it (a) has plenty of leg room (b) dual sunroofs and (c) isn’t a Toyota.

Randy’s car is awesome in many regards but it was the state-of-the-art navigation system that sold him.

Who that, you ask? Well, it’s a fab little device that lets you keep your eye on the road while you talk to your car. Randy likes to use the system to call people, hands free, or, more often, to command it to play music.

Unfortunately, his car can’t understand Randy’s melodious Southern drawl.

I don’t know what I’m gonna do, Randy told me. I tell it, as plain as I know how, to Play artist Hall and Oates and it will come back with this hateful Yankee voice that snaps at me, I didn’t understand you. So then I say, "I said Hall and Oates, por favor because I’m feeling just a little bit hateful and I might as well be speaking in a furrin language.

So I say again to the machine, Play Rich Girl. It’s one of my favorites. I remember the first time I heard it I was in high school and it had been out for a long time but I really liked it because I was actually dating a kinda rich girl at the time and what was her name?…She was really cute but a little taller than my usual girlfriends, ’cause you know I’m cursed in the height department. All the Wagram men are. My Uncle Elvin was short,

Reviews for She Drives Me Crazy

[karensmiththomas · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Very Funny!

[citizenjoyce · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Mean Southern girl humor is just not my thing. I don't like it from Rita Mae Brown, and now it seems I don't like it from Celia Rivenbark either. The first essay starts with a guy complaining that his car navigation system doesn't understand his southern accent so keeps giving him the wrong information - that's pretty funny. Then she segues into a long discussion of a woman who gets into an car accident because she tried to multitask shaving her pubic hair while she was driving to a date. In this story she never repeats the same nickname for vagina twice: vajayjay, cooch, nasties, whoha; I can't remember them all, but she never used my favorite, cookie. This was pretty funny until she said that the woman was so ugly that whoever her date was was never going to get as far as looking at her nether regions anyway. Was that necessary? Would it in any way have made a difference to the story? Nope, it was just a little throw away mean spiritedness. I don't need that kind of nonsense.