Mollen - I Like You Just the Way I Am: Stories About Me and Some Other People

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Im just looking for a girl who isnt drama.

MY HUSBAND, THE FIRST NIGHT WE MET.

(I love you)

Contents

Authors Note

The stories you are about to read are basically true. Though I tried to do my best in depicting the events as I remembered them, there are exaggerations, some characters are composites, and some time periods are condensed. The only thing Im sure of with complete certainty is that I was really thin and cute the whole time I was writing this.

Introduction

Hi, Im Jenny Mollen, an actress and writer living in Los Angeles. Im also a wife, married to a famous guy, which is infinitely annoying, because all the free stuff he gets never comes in my size. Sometimes I wish Id married Ellen.

Now, Im self aware enough to know that underneath my charming exterior, Im an insecure mess of a person who hates herself. But despite all that, its still pretty great being me. Why? Because I dont pretend Im not crazy. You guys, I am! But so are you! Crazy is just a word boring people use to describe fun people. And I am really, really fun!

What youre about to read is a collection of stories about my life. Its a book about not doing the right thing. Yes, its about me (not doing the right thing), but it is also a book about women, all of whom come in two types: those who are totally batshit crazy, and those who are liars. Its a book about acting on impulses, plotting elaborate hoaxes, and refusing to acknowledge boundaries in any form. Because why not? Youre already doing it secretly anyway. And reading your exs horoscope every week isnt going to help you control his life. No, you need to hide in his bushes, break into his e-mail, or kidnap his dog if you want to effect any real change.

We are a generation of females that never had to burn our bras, get a back-alley Mexican boob job, or bleed into a makeshift cloth diaper because tampons werent invented. Our generation is fighting for something different: honesty. Decorum went out the window when Madonna made the movie Truth or Dare, ladies. We dont need to be perfect. We need to be real.

This is my mission statement, my manifesto, and my plea to women everywhere: Indulge your inner sociopath. People are judging you anyway. Thats what people do. Im judging you right now for reading this book. There is zero reason to be ashamed of announcing and acting upon your real feelings.

Life is too short for bullshit. Im thirty-three, and my tits drop about half an inch a year. In other words, its all downhill from here. Someday very soon, ladies, we are going to be whatever fetish comes after cougar, unable to wear shirts without sleeves, and full of cell phone cancer. It is our obligation to live lives that convince our children not to ship us off to retirement homes because we are still kind of entertaining to have at parties. This book is utterly who I am when I am not trying to impress or protect someones feelings. It is my hope that you read it and become better acquainted with who you really are and what you really want. Which, lets be honest, is most likely someone elses e-mail password.

Behind Every Crazy Woman, Theres an Even More Batshit Mother

My mom was always more of a friend than an authority figure. But not like a laid-back friend who comes over to watch Homeland more like an annoying friend who comes over with two dudes you dont know and starts doing body shots off your sleeping roommate at 3 A.M. on a Wednesday.

Everyones mom is fucking crazy to some degree, and my mom is no different. Except that shes completely different because she is infinitely crazier than your mom. She is a product of Ashland, Oregon, in the 1960s, a reaction to a generation of Betty Homemakers and Goody Two-Shoes, and a man-eater with a serious penchant for partying. In her youth, my mom looked like a real-life Barbie. She has blond hair, one green eye and one blue eye, and tits that I inherited only after surgery. Though she always emphasized brains over beautyby talking shit about any woman who didnt make her own money and own at least one copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull my moms identity was heavily wrapped up in her physical appearance, and attention from the opposite sex was a prize I could never compete with. After dissecting her psychologically over the years, I feel I understand why she never stayed in one place for more than a year, why shes been married to every name in Paul Simons song 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, and why after a summer at sleepaway camp, she sat my sister and me down to tell us we needed to go live with our father because she didnt know how to be a mom anymore. (All of this was a step up from her mom, a lady who allowed my sister and me to sleep in cribs when we visited up until age nine.)

At times she felt like my child, especially when she would remind me that in another lifetime, I was the parent and she was the daughter. But mostly she felt like an older sister I was always trying to keep up with.

And according to everyone around me, I had it great! My mom was the fun mom. She was the woman who had her nipple pierced in front of my eighth-grade boyfriend. The woman who one time disclosed to a table full of dinner guests that I had recently taken a Bic razor and accidentally given my pussy a mohawk. And the woman who, when I was fifteen, told me I needed to get a fake ID if I wanted to keep hanging out with her.

* * *

Its just the way it is. You have one week to figure it out before your spring break, Mom threatened through the phone. At this point, I was living with my dad in Arizona, but every March I went out to visit my mom in San Diego for a week of mother/daughter debauchery.

Im serious, Jen. I had like three IDs when I was your age. Maybe four.

You were dating a drug dealer! I live in Scottsdale. I tried to contain my barking so as not to let my father hear our discussion.

Just figure it out. Okay? I heard the click of her thirty-pound cell phone hanging up.

There was no way I was going to figure it out. I was a sophomore in high school in one of the most conservative states in the country. I was a prep who wore business suits to school and carried a briefcase. I took myself incredibly serious and always threw big words around to let my peers know I was destined for a better life than them. The downside of elitism in high school is not having access to any illegal shit. I was on student government and the president of FACS (Fine Arts Community Service, a fake club I made up strictly for college applications). I had a gay boyfriend who claimed to be straight but was still on the tumbling team, and the two of us spent our wildest nights dancing around my bedroom acting out the Aladdin soundtrack. I would never even have seen marijuana if it werent for my mom having gotten me stoned the summer before eighth grade because she felt it might prevent me from smoking cigarettes.

I decided the easiest route would be to look for an older person I resembled, then ask them if they had a spare credit card, license, or gym membership with their birthday on it that I could possibly borrow. Unfortunately, everyone I approached seemed uneager to help.

So I arrived in San Diego the following week empty-handed.

Unbelievable, my mom moaned as she handed me her coffee mug filled with Coors Light and flipped a U-turn out of the airport.

For the first two days, we lay low. We saw a few movies, tried to talk about periods, and even played a couple rounds of Which of your husbands had the most money? But by the end of the week, my mom was restless and in need of a bronski. She decided our only option was to cross the border into Mexico.