This was a very funny book and one that I could completely relate to when it comes to aging as a woman today. Cathy provides some great insight on dealing with "middle-aged" women issues, from aging parents to empty nest syndrome to your child growing into adulthood.

I grew up reading the Cathy cartoons daily and loved these essays as they are even more relatable. As someone firmly in the middle of the child-parent sandwich I laughed out loud at some of the observations and got teary eyed at others. I’ll be passing this on to all of my friends who are where I am and I may just have my daughter read this as well.

Everyone knows the witty and shoe-loving Cathy Guisewite from the beloved Cathy comic strip that she produced for over 30 years. We already know that she has sharp repartee and insight as to what it means to be a woman in today's society. But fast forward to an older and even wiser Cathy Guisewite with insight on caring for aging parents, deflating body parts, changing shoe sizes, and clothes that don't fit...It's the book her beloved Cathy readers will enjoy for insight as to how Cathy might have aged alongside the rest of the population. The author is very smart and great with words...don't know how she was able to always express so much in a tiny cartoon square with these writing talents! Fun book on aging in line with "I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman" by Nora Ephron. Check it out!

Many thanks to NetGalley, GP Putnam Sons, and Cathy Guisewite for the opportunity to read this book - loved it! 5 stars - because it's Cathy of course!

I grew up reading the Cathy comic strip. As I grew older and went into the work world, there she was, going through similar things. It always made me laugh and feel less alone. Fast forward to her new book and the feelings are the same. She is now parenting an adult child as well as taking care of elderly parents. Everything is relatable! The feeling of being a computer whiz when talking to her parents and a Luddite when talking to your child. Talking to your parents about all the hard stuff while feeling the pain of children leaving. I laughed and cried through the whole book!

If you ever felt a kinship with Cathy reading her columns, you need this book!

A new essay collection by Cathy Guisewite, best known as the creator of the "Cathy" comic strip (chocolate, chocolate, chocolate, ack!). Guisewite writes in a warm, confiding tone of her life, relationship with her daughter, almost strangling herself with a sports bra in the dressing room, dealing compassionately with her aging parents, and more. It's basically like reading an extended, lightly illustrated "Cathy" strip, but I mean that in a good way. Her voice is reminiscent of Dave Barry, who shares that ability to mine her everyday life for the absurd.

I can’t say exactly why, as a grade-schooler in the ’80s, I loved reading Cathy: a comic strip about an adult woman navigating her roles as professional, as partner, as daughter. I imagine it was a combination of appreciation for the fun drawings, a familiarity with the four-panel pacing that earned the appreciation of Charles Schulz, and a curiosity about the adult world. My then-single aunt had a Cathy anthology, and I imagined her life must have have been just like Cathy’s.

It seemed even more clear that the strip was a highly autobiographical creation by Cathy Guisewite, who initially resisted naming the strip after herself but eventually succumbed to posing with lifesize Cathy cutouts. Like many standup comics, Guisewite used her strip to present a caricature of herself that was in fact inspired by her own experiences. She heard from thousands of women who said they could see themselves in Cathy as well.

While the strip was always a product of its time — the first anthology has the title character grappling with the ethics of the 1977 coffee boycott — the strip has dated more quickly than Guisewite and her readers might have imagined. The contested legacy of her life’s work is an undercurrent rippling through Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault, a new book of essays that brings Cathy fans up to speed on what Cathy (the author) has been up to.

On the surface, the book often reads a lot like a prose version of the comic strip. Guisewite chronicles her frustrations shopping for clothes that fit, sticking to a diet, and helping her parents cope with new technology. That’s right: during the period chronicled in Fifty Things, the mother and father whose cartoon likenesses are so familiar to Cathy fans were both still alive and lovably on-brand.

The book is dedicated to Guisewite’s mother (who penned her own advice book in 1987) and ends with a tribute to her father, who died in 2015. Aside from its interest for readers of the strip, Fifty Things describes and enshrines a moment in life that many of the author’s contemporaries will recognize. Guisewite’s daughter, adopted in 1992, was transitioning into independent adulthood, while her parents were transitioning, gradually but inexorably, out of it. The author, who quit her cartooning job in large part to spend time with all three, grappled with that transition as her loved ones start to need her in new ways.

The book is also something of a belated valedictory for the strip, as the creator of Cathy muses on the meaning of the 34-year strip for which she’ll be forever remembered. It was wildly successful; she has an entire room of Cathy licensed products, a recent Rachel Syme profile revealed, and the book doesn’t shy from the fact that the work left her financially comfortable. The strip remains a pop-culture touchstone, although these days it’s as likely to be the punchline of jokes as to be remembered for them.

Like the strip, Fifty Things chronicles the frustrations of trying to achieve the impossible in meeting the demands placed upon women while also adhering to the constraints: hence Guisewite’s protest that it’s “not my fault the sweat pants also hurt because someone decided women’s workout wear should be clingy and sexy to show off the hot ‘after’ body, not the non-hot, actually-needs-to-work-out ‘before’ body!”

Syme put her finger on what she called “the paradox of Cathy.” Guisewite is speaking her truth, and in so doing she’s still giving voice to her generation. “There were hardly any nationally syndicated comic strips that even hinted at women’s interiority before Cathy came bounding into papers,” wrote Syme. “And yet Guisewite broke through the glass ceiling by creating a character for whom disempowerment was a way of life.”

Fifty Things reveals that’s still where Guisewite goes to find the funny bone. She’s ridiculing the unrealistic expectations placed upon women, but at the same time implying a wish that all the contradictions of boomer femininity could somehow be resolved. The line above, for example, takes for granted that a curvy figure is “non-hot” and needs to be concealed — until workouts, as promised in the Jane Fonda era, result in a toned and “hot” body.

Fonda was justly hailed as an icon of her generation, but today’s icon is Lizzo, who reenacts a Fonda-style workout in her “Juice” video. The video suggests a new goal: being comfortable with yourself as a healthy, confident woman. The workout is an end in itself, not the means to an “after” body.

In an essay at the heart of Fifty Things, Guisewite grapples with the fact that feminism has moved on. The essay about relationships, titled “Love Stories,” suggests that “it’s a bit painful for my friend and me to see our daughters and remember who were when we were their age.” She knows her daughter will suffer much of the same confusion and frustrations she did — such is the human condition — but also sees her daughter maturing into a world where they can more confidently demand that partners like Irving, from Cathy, respect them as equals.

Looking back on her own years as a young woman, Guisewite writes, “Women were excited by the new world other women were talking and writing about, but without real-life proof, it was hard to believe it was possible to try for a loving, equality-based relationship with someone who would support our dreams, not try to stifle them.”

It’s clear that Fifty Things will resonate with its most natural audience — Guisewite’s peers who moved through adulthood with Cathy — but for anyone who’s been drawn to the author’s work, Fifty Things will read as a moving reflection on art and life, on personal progress and social progress, on generation and regeneration.

When I was a kid, Cathy taught me about adulthood, showing me an inner world shared in many respects by the women who raised me. I’m now an adult, and Guisewite is still teaching me about her generation’s experiences. As I continue to, let’s say, grow up, I expect that I’ll continue to appreciate both the specific and the universal truths that Cathy, and Cathy, have illuminated. Aack!

This is a rare DNF for me as a reviewer. I made myself plod through 128 of the 265 pages before deciding that unless someone was going to pay me there was no way I'd even skim the rest.

This is 1980's Cathy in 2019, and she has not aged well. An upper middle class white woman moans about things like having old looking legs, having her shoes no longer fit, paying $145 for a pair of jeans that looks okay, having to listen to her friend's adventure of cleaning out her whole house instead of taking a European vacation this year, and on and on.

Guisewite also writes about her 19 y/o daughter coming home from college, and she paints her daughter in the same cliched light as herself. The daughter is whiny, spoiled and doesn't clean up after herself. Cathy is a dreadful nagging mother who picks her up from the airport and immediately starts criticizing her and telling her what to do (you should have brushed your hair, stand up straight, etc. for pages and pages), leading to further angry distance between the two of them. Is this supposed to be funny? Is this supposed to be relatable? I have a 19 year old of my own (and a 21, 16, 12 and 8 year old) and I would never pick at her like this. My mom did to me, but that was decades ago and I kind of thought most of us had figured out that it was crappy parenting that just alienates kids. Shrug.

I feel for Guisewite as she writes about navigating a relationship with her aging parents in their 90's, but again it's written like it's maybe supposed to be funny but is just kind of depressing. If she had written about this stuff that so many of us are really wrestling with in a way that dropped the fake funny essay tone and attempted to find some meaning in it, I could have loved it. But none of these things are topics for humor, or at least not in this way. At times she seems to be trying for the heartfelt essay, but it just misses the mark.

I found Guisewite absolutely self absorbed, vapid and boring. After this many years of life and success, the fact that she still has nothing better to muse about than her old legs and fat feet and whether the checkout girl in the grocery store is impressed by her career makes me honestly pretty disappointed in her as a person.

Two stars because while I really dislike her and the book she does know how to write a sentence. Some older, middle/upper class white women are likely to relate to the book and enjoy it.

I read half of a temporary digital ARC of this book for the purpose of review. I am not putting a read date on it so it doesn't unfairly count towards my yearly total, but I almost feel like I should get some sort of credit for having to read over a hundred pages of this.

Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault is an amusing and inspiring stroll through the past with Cathy Guisewite. I was hoping this book (which is actually a collection of essays) would do the beloved comic strip “Cathy” justice— and for me, it did. I guess I was like most women who were fans of “Cathy.” We were growing up in a time where feminism was becoming a force to be reckoned with.

I love the way the author deftly handles subject matter of her essays in keeping time with the feelings of the many Cathy fans who lived through that challenging time in women’s history. The essays are wonderful and I am happy to recommend Fifty Things That Aren’t My Fault.

I enjoyed "Cathy" in the comics. I really didn't enjoy this book. A friend recommended this book, she did enjoy it. Everyone likes different genres, not my fault.

Guisewite began publishing the comic strip “Cathy” in 1976, the year that I graduated high school. It was a time of high expectations for women, and the unrealistic suggestion that we would be able to “bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan, and never let you forget you’re a man,” as Madison Avenue decreed, was daunting. Through her sharply perceptive humor, Guisewite let her peers know that it wasn’t just us; we were judging ourselves with an unfair yardstick. She kept it real, and in doing so, kept us sane.

My thanks go to Net Galley and G.P. Putnam for the review copy.

So how does cartooning translate to prose? Whereas the cute, punchy single-page entries and single sentence proclamations—and the lists—are her most familiar territory, my favorite parts of this memoir are the least cartoonish ones. Yes, I love the way she takes down the women’s fashion industry and the unhealthy way it affects our body images. She was good at it forty years ago, and she’s good at it now. But the passages that drew me in and let me get lost in her story are the more vulnerable, deeply perceptive parts of the narrative, her fears for her aging parents; the struggle and triumph of raising a daughter, one with special needs, alone; and the failure of her marriage. I am in awe of the fact that she and her ex made each other laugh until the tears came as they planned their divorce. Who does that? And of course, she made me laugh too.

Guisewite stays inside her usual parameters, never veering outside of the middle class Caucasian realm with which she has experience. Younger women won’t get much joy out of this memoir; women that came of age between 1965 and 1985 are right in her sweet spot, and it is to them that I recommend this book. It’s available now.

I am the perfect demographic for this book, subtitled “Essays From the Grown-Up Years”: I loved the “Cathy” comic strip, and found it so frequently absolutely NAILED situations/relationships/dilemmas in my own life as a woman who spent a boatload of time in the 70s-80s-90s reveling in the feminist energy I felt all around me while also struggling with issues related to self-esteem, body image, gender equality, etc.

Not being a mother, I haven’t really shared the mother-daughter experiences such as Cathy and her daughter share, so those who find themselves in what Guisewite calls the “panini generation” may more closely relate to some of the essays. But I still laughed frequently and choked back a few tears as I read about her experiences dealing with her aging parents and her adopted daughter as she watches her growing up.

I loved learning about the actual woman behind the comic strips that have given me so much enjoyment over the years, and I appreciate the emotion conveyed in the essays in this collection. I loved it and will likely gift it to more than a couple of women I know… those who share my feeling as I read Ms. Guisewite’s words: “My whole generation is reeling from the stunning truth – that we, who are way too young and hip to ever look or act old, are not too young to pass away.”

Thanks to Penguin Group Putnam and NetGalley for a copy in exchange for this honest review. Five Stars.

A fun read by the author who created the Cathy comics. Readers will need to give the book at least 3+ chapters before it really gets going, but it is an honest and open title by the author.

Such a fun read! I grew up reading the Cathy comic strip and had to grab this one when I saw the author. While I don't share the author's love of fancy shoes, there's lots to identify with in this collection of essays on daily life. Definitely one I'll recommend to any moms, daughters and those stuck in the middle.

I adored the comic strip “Cathy” as a young adult and I am happy to see and know that the author is just as good at writing essays about real life as she was at creating relatable cartoon characters! Her style is conversational and I enjoyed the humor and authentic voice she brought to the page.

Thanks to NetGalley, the author and publisher for an advanced reading copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

I thoroughly enjoyed laughing and crying while reading this very relatable book. Highly recommended.

The Cathy comic strip was always a favorite of mine. I even once had a Cathy shirt that encapsulated my life as a twenty something just out of college. Thus I was quite certain I would enjoy these essays by Cathy Guisewite and I really did. My favorite thing about the book was the scribbles throughout as they are such a great reminder of her strip. I was also impressed with her ability to honor her parents and her relationship with her daughter while at the same time making us laugh. She has a gift for elevating those she is making jokes about. Her essays are very relatable although at times a bit longwinded and I struggled to find any organized flow to the essays. A good book to read slowly, one essay at a time, rather than devour quickly.

A big thank you to Putnam and NetGalley for a digital ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

The comic strip Cathy was loved by millions. She gave Women of all ages permission to feel how they felt about life, love and themselves. We would read that day’s edition & think phew! I’m not the only one. When she retired she was greatly missed! Thankfully she has written what one hopes is the first of many books. Fifty Things is a gift for all the women in your life and if the men are smart they will open the book as well.

I read Cathy every day growing up so I was happy to check this out. Lots of cute essays about being in the "sandwich" generation--being not so young yourself yet having to take care of your children and your parents. Great for fans of the comic or Nora Ephron's essays. I'm a bit young for this and childfree but I found them entertaining.

Funny. Insightful. Sarcastically hilarious. Real. Fifty Things That Aren't My Fault made me laugh. It made me smack my head with the heel of my hand when I recognized myself in Cathy on those pages~ So good and absolutely lived up to any expectations I had, big or small, as a lifetime fan of the Cathy cartoon strip. The perfect read for my favorite past time: a comfy chair with a cup of tea and a book that I love that I can't put down.

I loved the Cathy comics as a kid (the final strip was released in 2010, when I graduated from college, so I read the majority of these between the ages of probably 10 and 20) so I was super stoked to see that Guisewite had written an essay collection. And while I think that the tone is entertaining and funny, I just can't relate to a lot of what is within these pages. I feel like I am maybe a bit younger than Guisewite's target audience (this seems more aimed toward people in their 50's, dealing with teenaged children and elderly parents) and it really is written to appeal to that demographic, rather than being more universally appealing. The body image issues and self-deprecating humor that were used so often (and so hilariously) in the Cathy strip feel dated when talked about at length in these essays. Yes, we all still have body image issues, but the way it's written here seems to completely disregard all of the many ways we have moved past that point thanks to the body positive movement. I think this is a generally well-written book and there are certainly people who will greatly enjoy/relate to it.