“AMY ROSENTHAL

My father in law informed me that my married name could produce these two anagrams: Hearty Salmon. Nasty Armhole. I cannot tell you how much I love that.”

This is the first entry in Amy Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life. The title is not metaphoric in any sense; this non-fiction memoir of Rosenthal’s life actually takes the form of an encyclopedia, alphabetically ordering both emotional events and the minutiae of everyday living. Rosenthal got the idea in part from her fascination with the fragmentary style of The Pillowbook of Sei Shonagon, in which a court lady in tenth century Japan records anecdotes, descriptions, character sketches, and lists of things that she liked or disliked. And so Rosenthal set about the task of creating a similar record for a twenty-first century regular American woman.

And Rosenthal stresses the ‘ordinary’ nature of her life; her Forward ends with the proclamation, “I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.” A happily-married 39-year-old mother of three then proceeds to amuse, enchant and move the reader in a series of entries that range from an entry on ‘Identity,’ which includes two pictures drawn by police sketch artists according to descriptions of the author by first her father and then her husband, to an entry on ‘Dying,’ which concludes, “And we can’t forget malpractice. My sister-in-law died at the age of thirty-two during childbirth because the doctors and nurses missed the red-flagged allergic to anesthesia warning on her medical chart. People don’t die anymore in childbirth, everyone knows that, but yet they do; sweet, stunning, silk-scarf-wearing, multilingual Hilary did. People are just dying everywhere, all the time, every which way. What can the rest of us do but hold on for dear life.”

Whether you are laughing aloud, nodding in recognition, or plunged in thought, the book is fun to read. At first, perhaps, it’s frustrating that there is no story, no arc, but soon this haphazard if alphabetical arrangement becomes part of the book’s charm; after all, the arrangement of life itself is random and will rarely comply with a narrative.

Visit the book’s website here; read a review, an excerpt, or see a video of Amy at USAToday.