This review was written by Craigo for his band’s website Upsuck, originally published on July 4, 2022.
Karen and I have been good buddies for a long time. Back in the pre-legalization days, when there was still a thriving underground stoner subculture, Karen lived in LA and I lived here in Tempe and any time either of us were in each other’s town, we’d hit each other up for some good local ganja. I’ve hung out and gotten high with Karen countless times, so when I heard she’d written a book, I of course had to read it.
And while this genre of book isn’t my typical fare, it was surprisingly entertaining! Each chapter in the book represents a squeamish and awkward date, told in Karen’s hilarious prose, and I found myself getting red-faced on behalf of some of the self-absorbed douchebags she lambastes throughout. It is all pretty funny and embarrassing.
I don’t know if she did it intentionally or not, but for the first seven chapters/bad dates, Karen is primarily a wine drinker, and I found myself thinking “Is she actually going to write this whole book without admitting she’s a pothead!?” It also wasn’t lost on me that perhaps these dates all went so bad because she wasn’t high…?
But that notion is dismissed by Chapter 8, which was about a guy who shipped weed surreptitiously by canning it and making it look like soup. And from thence on, the Karen in the book was the Karen Knighton I have known all my life, merrily hitting her bong while her amateur dates are puking their guts after doing the same.
The other thing I really enjoyed about this book is that, like me, Karen was brought up as a Mormon, and her quips about her former religion throughout the book are pretty fun. I’ve read many an entreaty from well-adjusted former Mormons, but admittedly none of those authors were female, so Karen’s insights here were unique and engaging. If she wrote a whole other book specifically about this, I would scoop it up in a heartbeat.
One of my earliest memories of Karen is being at a prudish Mormon youth dance, where the stated rule is that you should be able to fit a “quad” (a massive 4-in-1 book containing all of the Mormon scriptures) between the two people dancing. Out of nowhere, Karen and a South American foreign-exchange student began dirty dancing right in the middle of everybody, and were quickly scolded by the horrified chaperones present.
Sounds about right for the future author of this sentence (from chapter 17): “His version of comedy was killing my lady boner.”