Glossed Over Book Club: Jean Godfrey-June's Free Gift with Purchase, Chapters Two-Four

Chapter Two:  This is the chapter that made us almost—almost—like Jean Godfrey-June.  (Don’t worry—the feeling quickly faded.)  Her tale of sneaking into the bathroom to apply makeup before her boyfriend woke up struck a chord with us.  Her recollection of a science teacher who turned slaughterhouse remnants into Viking helmets did not.  There was an actual point to the story, something trite about how beauty rituals allow people to have control in a chaotic world, but we aren’t sure how the science teacher anecdote related to it, and we refuse to read those paragraphs again.  Ew.

Chapter Three: Jean’s father eats tuna covered in ketchup and molasses every morning.  We’re sure there was more substance (or at least more text) to this chapter, but that disgusting concoction is pretty much all we remember.  Oh!  And she’s always had the obnoxious habit of adding suffixes to extant words to create, well, non-extant ones.  As a child, she added “-ington” to people’s names—Jeanington, etc.  And, in a stunning display of naivete or stupidity, she chose to attend the University of Colorado because the subscription cards in her favorite magazines were addressed to Boulder, and she therefore assumed that the city was a hotbed of periodical publishing.  Sure, we’ve made life choices based on false information too, but you don’t see us writing about them for the world to see, do you?

Chapter Four: In what is surely its first appearance ever, the phrase “nasolabial-fold-emphasizing” appears in a story about getting a pedicure with a porn star.  (And we’re not sure what this says about our reading material, but we’ve seen that  “nasolabial” everywhere lately, usually followed by the admonition that it’s not dirty.  Enough!  We know!)  There are multiple tales of beauty rivalries with friends that are neither interesting nor vicious nor revelatory.  Beauty tip: Lauren Hutton suggests drawing a concealer stripe down the center of your nose  to make it look smaller.  And news flash!  Models endorsing beauty products are just there to collect a paycheck.  One unnamed model floundered when it was her turn to present the products to Jean; another anonymous mannequin admitted publicly that she had never smelled the fragance she was touting.

Next up: Jean continues her series of stories that are probably charming if you know her personally but are inexorably dull to the those of us who don’t.  Also, she goes out to lunch!  A lot!