Book ~ "I Regret Nothing: A Memoir" (2015) Jen Lancaster

From Goodreads ~ Sure Jen has made mistakes. She spent all her money from a high-paying job on shoes, clothes and spa treatments. She then carried a Prada bag to the unemployment office. She wrote a whole memoir about dieting … but didn’t lose weight. She embarked on a quest for cultural enlightenment that only cemented her love for John Hughes movies and Kraft American Singles. She tried to embrace everything Martha Stewart, while living with a menagerie of rescue cats and dogs (glitter… everywhere).

Mistakes are one thing; regrets are another.

After a girls’ weekend in Savannah makes her realize that she is - yikes! - middle-aged (binge watching is so the new binge drinking), Jen decides to make a bucket list and seize the day, even if that means having her tattoo removed at one hundred times the cost of putting it on.

From attempting a juice cleanse to studying Italian, from learning to ride a bike to starting a new business, and from sampling pasta in Rome to training for a 5K, Jen is turning a mid-life crisis into a mid-life opportunity, sharing her sometimes bumpy - but always hilarious - attempts to better her life … again. 

At 46, Jen is married to Fletcher, able to make a living writing and mom to cats and dogs.  It hits her that she is middle-aged and she wants to move forward with no regrets ...

"At my age, I feel like I'm halfway to the finish line and life's too short to do what I'm sure to hate."

She has decided that she won't say "no" to her friends so she'll have new and different experiences and she'll create a bucket list ... she relearns how to ride a bike, takes Italian lessons, goes on vacation to Italy, meets an icon, turns her hobby of refinishing furniture into a profit, and more.  But it's also the time she looks inwards and wants to start getting healthier physically and emotionally (apparently she ended up losing 70 pounds).

I liked the writing style ... it's funny and sarcastic.  I think she would be fun to be around.  I found in this book, though, that she was more honest and less snarky at times, especially when she describes her feelings of being overweight.

I liked her use of sidebars ... I hated it when she used footnotes in her earlier memoirs (too much distraction having to look down then back up then down then back up).  I liked that there were some pictures in the books, especially of her dogs.  As a head's up, there is swearing.

Though not a fan of her fiction, I've read all her memoirs and have enjoyed them for the most part.