Girl with Glasses

My Optic History

By: Marissa Walsh

Narrated by: Margie Lenhart

Length: 2 hrs and 43 mins

Publisher's summary

Being a Girl with Glasses isn't just a style choice; it's a way of life. If you've ever had your specs steam up when walking into a bar, squinted into the sun on the soccer field, or laid eyes on a new haircut only after your locks are strewn across the floor, you know what it's like to be a GWG. Marissa Walsh has worn glasses since third grade. Now - 10 pairs of glasses, one pair of prescription sunglasses, and endless pairs of contacts later - she has fully embraced her four-eyed fate. As she recounts her optic history through the lenses of each pair of glasses - from the Sergio Valentes and the Sally Jessy Raphaels to the pseudo John Lennons and the dreaded health plan specs - at last she found them...the perfect pair. Marissa's comic look at a life behind glass is at once a poignant personal journey and a wry, canny exploration of just what it means to be a glasses-wearing kind of girl. Peppered with pop culture references and complete with appendixes of resources, classic GWG moments, and helpful tips on finding the right frames for your face, Girl with Glasses will give you reason to commiserate with your shortsighted sisters and celebrate your less-than-perfect vision.

©2006 Marissa Walsh (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Nothing to Write Home About

I kept waiting for something unique or interesting to happen, but it never did. And the narrator sounds like she's doing an infomercial....

Through a Lens Clearly

I'm not really sure what Marissa Walsh's "Girl With Glasses: My Optic History" (2006) was. An autobiography? Not really, I don't know where Walsh went to college except that it was probably one of the Seven Sisters, Is Walsh trying to do for glasses what Lisa Birnbach did for dock siders sans socks and polo shirts in "The Official Preppy Handbook" (1980)? Probably not - it wasn't advice l about which glasses work well with plaid skirts and blue blazers.

I've decided that no matter how Audible or Barnes & Noble categorizes GWG (Walsh's nickname for the type), it's a mildly amusing memoir framed by half a dozen pairs of glasses, interspersed with occasional forays into contact lenses. Walsh, in contacts, is literally a different person. She's aimlessly striving, uncomfortable in her own skin, annoyingly uncertain about clothes, and doesn't fit in no matter where she is. Wearing glasses, Walsh is a clever observer; wry and charmingly self deprecating; becomes a New York hipster; and doesn't care about blending . Walsh writing about being in contacts is forgettable; in glasses, she's got super powers.

I'm not sure what the text version looked like, but I suspect it has lots of lists, bolding, bullet points and italics. If that's the case, the narration worked fine. GWG was an okay enough way to pass a three hour traffic jam on the 405 South.

It had some LOL moments!

This book is cute! I would never have picked it out myself, but Audible had it on a Valentines day free list, so I bit, and I am very pleased that I did. Overall it was a sweet and charming listen. Not bad for a free book. Plus, the author is the exact same age as me, so I felt a kinship as I listened. It did jump around in some strange spots, for instance, I have NO IDEA what ended up happening to her teacher. I figured one of three things happened, 1) I either didn't pay enough attention (it happens),2) my phone didn't download it properly so it missed a section, or 3) the author just expects that you understand what she is getting at without her actually saying it. I am not sure which is the case, but none the less, the book was sweet, quirky and charming. You could definitely do worse!

Not Enjoyable

Would you try another book from Marissa Walsh and/or Margie Lenhart?

Marissa Walsh: NoMargie: Maybe

Would you ever listen to anything by Marissa Walsh again?

Not for a very long time/ever

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

I feel like the narration could have been better but I feel like she did the best that she could with what she had to work with.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Girl with Glasses?

All of them.

Any additional comments?

Not an enjoyable read/listen. Would not recommend.

Good enough for a 3-hour drive

Would you say that listening to this book was time well-spent? Why or why not?

I received this book as a freebie from Audible in a Valentine's promotional. I listened to it on a 3-hour drive one afternoon, so it worked well for that. I found the story to be interesting enough to help the time pass but not interesting enough that I would have wanted to pay for it.

I could not finish!

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

better distinction between the chapters or sections. I didn't know where one ended and the next began

What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?

I could get past the first 30 minutes

What didn’t you like about Margie Lenhart’s performance?

She was reading to fast. I couldn't tell where a paragraph ended and the next one began! Everything was strung together like a giant stream of conciousness.

You didn’t love this book... but did it have any redeeming qualities?

no

There's no story!

Would you try another book from Marissa Walsh and/or Margie Lenhart?

Unlikely

What was most disappointing about Marissa Walsh’s story?

There IS no story. It's just a series of snippets about some unimportant, disconnected events that took place during the time the author wore different pairs of glasses. There was nothing to tie the 'stories' together. No plot, no sense of importance. Just meaningless glimpses into the author's past.

Did the narration match the pace of the story?

The narration was fine considering there wasn't much to work with.

Was Girl with Glasses worth the listening time?

I wouldn't necessarily say it was a "waste of time" since I listen while walking my dogs. But it is certainly nothing memorable or worth recommending to anyone else.

Any additional comments?

Don't waste your time.

Behind the Lenes?

I haven't been a GWG (girl with glasses) and I thought this would be a look behind the lenses but nope. I didn't any unique or different perspective on being a woman growing up wearing glasses and how the world response to you. I got the history of frames and frame picks. What is the point?

Best not to be listened to all in one sitting

"Girl with Glasses" was not meant to be read aloud all of a piece like this. It's a collection of essays and sketches and vignettes and lists; a few have a beginning, a middle, and an end, but more have just a beginning and a middle and left me saying "wait, what about -?" A few seemed like just beginnings that broke off. The lists were entertaining. But for the narrator – who did a very nice job overall, and to whom I would be happy to listen again – to just read this from start to finish, with little pause between essays or sections or whathaveyou, was awkward. There was one bit where it talks about how the author hired a homeless man to help her shift her luggage, which was immediately followed by a statement along the lines of "I had planned to sleep with him that night", leaving me wondering if the homeless man was an extraordinarily talented luggage shifter. On paper (or pixels) I'm sure there were line breaks that made that make sense, but read aloud I believe there was no more than the usual sort of pause between sentences. Audiobooks have directors, right? I don't think this director did a swell job.

This was an almost coy sort of a memoir, a tease – "I will reveal a bit, and you will expect more, and you'll never get it". In places (probably the places that wouldn't result in lawsuits) there was detail; in other places no detail at all, including names (though why if she was concerned about the Bad Room-mates' or Bus Guy's reactions she couldn't have just done a names-have-been-changed-to-forestall-the-litigious sort of thing, just to maintain a consistency of *using* names, I don't really understand.). The part that irritated me most was the mention of a college relationship that never got beyond flirtatious emails, about which she wonders if glasses might have been part of the reason (along the lines of people of that age group were still learning to kiss, and kissing with glasses poses special challenges), and in the whole brief essay she is annoyingly vague, down to never using pronouns. If the person she was attracted to was a woman, why on earth not just say so? She'd already (in a roundabout way) said her first real kiss was with a woman, so...?

As what she would call a fellow GWG (Girl With Glasses) – since second grade, I don't know how many pair without sitting and researching, and similarly having briefly worn and walked away from contact lenses – it was inevitable that I nodded a lot while listening to this, and found that "oh, you too?" sort of smile on my face quite a bit. It was a little like when I started discovering that I wasn't the only young geek to be completely obsessed with Star Trek; it's oddly unsettling to find that someone else has felt exactly the same thing you have. With something like the universal dilemma of "I have to pick out new frames, but I can't see what I look like in any of these frames because I'm blind without my glasses", or the shocking agony and terror of being sent out into the sunlight with dilated eyes. (How eyecare offices justify sending people out to drive home in that condition is beyond me. How I've made it home some half dozen times without dying in a fiery wreck is also beyond me. I have found there is no good meteorological situation for trying to function with dilated eyes; bright sunlight is obviously bad, but overcast or darkness is equally bad because streetlights become damn near fireworks, and oncoming headlights are twinned points of horror. And then there was that snowy evening I had to drive some ten miles to get home...) But I never really thought about anyone else eschewing contact lenses in part to avoid the sheer nakedness of not wearing this framework on my face. I hated it; I hated being able to feel wind in my eyes (car windows couldn't be down, suddenly, no matter how warm it was); hated the exposure.

One thing where we differed a bit was in the skittish question of someone else taking off one's glasses. She mentions it as a level of intimacy, and controlling how and when is happens (and who by). I've never yet met the person I'd allow the liberty. It's only happened to me once, or nearly (I dodged back in time to avoid it), and I was never so outraged in my life by the invasiveness of it. Like the author, apparently, I am legally blind without my glasses (and wasn't that an odd thing to be told not all that long ago), and so not having glasses means I am extremely vulnerable (and can never time travel anywhere glasses would be anachronistic, alas). For someone I barely knew to reach out to take my glasses off was tantamount to having him start unbuttoning buttons. In other words: don't do that.

The main area where we two GWG's differ, though, and this actually annoyed me, was when she blithely tossed off the information that she had never lost or broken a pair of glasses. I've never lost a current pair (backup, yes, but not current) - for the simple reason that if I am awake they are on my face, almost without exception (and sometimes when I am not awake). By "never", she - and I - mean "never apart from those times when they get knocked off the night table and end up taking an excruciatingly long groping time to find" - the I-need-my-glasses-to-find-my-glasses moments that punctuate my life with panic … she states that that only happened to her once. I'm not sure I buy that. It's a bit like having a Kindle. It's a rather expensive little apparatus (depending on the type), which becomes such a vade mecum that one becomes more careless of it than one ought. My glasses are literally always with me, and it's easy to forget that they cost the earth (over $500, last pair). I broke my frames a few months ago - and I loved those frames; they were the first ones I ever cared about - and because I haven't had an insurance in years that covered glasses (have I ever?) I had to wear old ones while the current lenses got put into the closest frame I could find, which have a ridiculous loud print on the earpieces... Ah well. Hopefully I'll get a new pair this summer. But that wasn't the first time I've broken a pair. It's happened a few times - once dropped onto concrete-underlaid flooring at work; this last time carelessly left beside me in bed while mostly asleep only to be squashed in the morning. There is nothing quite like the sick feeling of holding in two hands two separate pieces of what used to be one's glasses, and trying desperately figure out a way to jury-rig them back together (preferably without looking like an idiot), wishing desperately for Hermione to come along and say "Oculo reparo", trying desperately to remember where the old pair are, so that one can drive to - hopefully - get them fixed, or, more likely and more expensively, replaced. (When the frame snaps at the nosepiece, the reaction to "can they be fixed?" is basically "ha ha ha no".) She's apparently never had to keep wearing the same glasses for years because of financial reasons; go her.

TL;DR = cute idea; not great execution.

Good story - not delivered well

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

Didn't like the delivery or flow of the story.

Who was your favorite character and why?

n/a

What didn’t you like about Margie Lenhart’s performance?

Did not like her voice or delivery.