The ending was fantastic, had to slog through a lot of "oh poor sad me" to get there.... ( )

A quirky, delightful story about the journey of creating something. I love Miranda July's voice and her honest examination of herself as she risks her comfort zone to explore the lives of PennySaver users. Just a very good book. ( )

I just read the 2011 book “It Chooses You” by filmmaker and artist Miranda July. It’s one of the best books about ethnographic research that isn’t really actually about ethnographic research. In the book she describes a period of her life where she was creatively stalled in finishing the screenplay for her film “The Future.” As a way to either get unblocked or just avoid what she should be working on, she develops another project, to call people who have placed ads in the free classified newspaper the PennySaver, and arrange to come to their homes and interview them.
The interviews are sort of about the thing being sold, but because she’s getting outside of her cultural bubble, she takes a wider view, asking people about a period in their life when they were happy and whether or not they used a computer (since even in 2011 a newspaper with classified ads was a relic of a previous era).
She reports on each of the interviews, including excerpts of the transcripts, and some amazing photographs. They are confounding, hilarious, disturbing, touching – everything you’d expect. And July is honest about what makes her uncomfortable, about her own failures to properly exhibit empathy when it’s needed, or the challenge in exercising caution while still being open to connecting with strangers, about what she was feeling about her own life as she heard from people about their hopes, their reflections back on a life lived well or not so well, about her own judgements about the people she met and then what she began to think about her own life and her own future.
In one chapter she meets Beverly, a woman with Bengal Leopard babies and birds and sheep and dogs. Beverly was clearly excited for Miranda’s visit, and prepared an enormous amount of fruit-and-marshmallow salad which neither July nor her crew want, but accept out of politeness, eager to get away, and then head to a gas station and throw it all away, covering the trash with newspaper in case Beverly stops by. I felt my own judgement of Miranda for her judgement of Beverly, but I can imagine doing the exact same thing in a similar circumstance, and I appreciate her ability to observe her own judgment and infuse it with compassion at the same time. Ultimately, she views her struggles to connect as her own personal failure, saying “the fullness of Beverly’s life was menacing to me – there was no room for invention, no place for the kind of fictional conjuring that makes me feel useful, or feel anything at all. She wanted me to just actually be there and eat fruit with her.” But in articulating something so nuanced and personal, we learn an awful lot about her as well.
I can’t believe it took me this long to finally read this book, but I can’t recommend it highly enough.
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A very quick read, but uninteresting. A woman interviews a hand full of people who have advertised in the PennySaver newspaper in an effort to find her way through a writer's block. Didn't like it at all. ( )

I'm not a Miranda July fan, and I didn't like 'The Future' however, this book was alright, I didn't like a lot of her personal ramblings, but the people she meets throughout her visits are interesting and the last interview and conclusion really made me love this book a little more. It's an easy read, large text so it looks longer than it is, it's actually quite short. Worth the time it takes to get through. ( )