Jason Ramshaw grew up in St. Louis noticing everything and understanding none of it.
At nine, he published a neighborhood newspaper — eleven subscribers, a quarter each. At eleven, he organized a Neighborhood Olympics, wrote the rules, and then won it. A boy named Derek finished second and has probably not thought about it since. Jason thinks about it constantly.
A Perfectly Normal Childhood (and Other Lies I Tell Myself) is 33 essays about growing up with undiagnosed generalized anxiety disorder and assuming the way he experienced the world was the way everyone did. It wasn't. He didn't find that out until he was 35, sitting in a therapist's office, learning that "generalized" is a very specific type of generalization — and he didn't appreciate being in the general category regarding anything.
Each essay follows the same pattern: a behavior he thought was normal, a replay that proves it wasn't, and a quiet realization that he's been running the same operating system his entire life. The book doesn't build toward a lesson. It builds toward a recognition.
For fans of David Sedaris, Sloane Crosley, Nora Ephron, and Jenny Lawson. Book 1 of the Still Noticing trilogy.
Jason Ramshaw grew up in St. Louis noticing everything and understanding none of it.
At nine, he published a neighborhood newspaper — eleven subscribers, a quarter each. At eleven, he organized a Neighborhood Olympics, wrote the rules, and then won it. A boy named Derek finished second and has probably not thought about it since. Jason thinks about it constantly.
A Perfectly Normal Childhood (and Other Lies I Tell Myself) is 33 essays about growing up with undiagnosed generalized anxiety disorder and assuming the way he experienced the world was the way everyone did. It wasn't. He didn't find that out until he was 35, sitting in a therapist's office, learning that "generalized" is a very specific type of generalization — and he didn't appreciate being in the general category regarding anything.
Each essay follows the same pattern: a behavior he thought was normal, a replay that proves it wasn't, and a quiet realization that he's been running the same operating system his entire life. The book doesn't build toward a lesson. It builds toward a recognition.
For fans of David Sedaris, Sloane Crosley, Nora Ephron, and Jenny Lawson. Book 1 of the Still Noticing trilogy.
I didn't set out to write a book. I set out to tell you about the haunted house.
My brother and I. Garbage bags, wire hangers, an office chair. Admission: whatever we could charge. We ran a kid through a dark basement and he went face-first into the carpet on opening night. We forgot to buy insurance. We were ten and eight. The operation lasted one evening. It felt, at the time, like the most complete thing I'd ever built.
I told that story at a dinner party — or whatever you call it when four people are eating pasta and someone says something that changes the direction of the evening. People laughed. Not politely. The kind of laugh where you can see someone recalibrating their opinion of you, slightly, in real time. So I told another one. The magic shows. The newspaper nobody subscribed to. The multiplication table I put off for thirty-six years. Each one landed. Each one seemed, on its own, like just a story.
I started writing them down.
Not because I thought they added up to something. Because they were funny, and I liked the way they sounded when I said them out loud, and because I have never in my life been able to leave a good bit on the table. Thirty-three stories. Organized chronologically, which is the laziest form of structure and also the only one that felt honest. Here's what happened. Here's what I was thinking while it happened. Here's what I was really thinking, which was usually different.
I called it A Perfectly Normal Childhood because the childhood was perfectly normal. Also because it wasn't. The distance between those two things was the whole book.
What I didn't realize — and I want to be honest about this, because the alternative is pretending I saw the whole thing coming, and I didn't — was that the stories were connected. Not just thematically. Structurally. The kid performing magic tricks was doing the same thing as the kid running the haunted house was doing the same thing as the kid publishing a newspaper was doing the same thing as the kid who snapped his fingers in a quiet room to see who would flinch. Every story was a different angle on the same machine, and the machine was already running, and I didn't know it was a machine. I thought it was personality.
These are the stories from before I noticed what I was noticing.
Before the behaviors got job titles. Before the magic trick became a sales pitch and the haunted house became operations and the competitive streak became — well, it stayed a competitive streak. Some things don't get renamed. They just get more expensive.
This was a kid in Missouri. Doing things that looked ordinary from the outside and felt extremely specific from the inside. Building systems he didn't know were systems. Reading rooms he didn't know he was reading.
I wrote the stories because they were mine and I wanted them down on paper before they became something else. Before they softened or rearranged themselves into whatever version memory prefers. I wanted the original footage. The raw data, before anyone — including me — started interpreting it.
That's what this book is. First recordings. The earliest evidence of something that was already running — in a basement in Missouri, on hardware that hadn't been tested yet.
I'm still noticing, by the way. That hasn't stopped.
But it started here. In the haunted house. At the magic show. In a driveway with a stack of newspapers that no one asked for and everyone got anyway.
It started before I knew it was starting. Which, I would later learn, is the only way it starts.
Chapter 1: The Media Mogul
Age 9
Every great publishing empire begins somewhere. Rupert Murdoch had his father's newspaper. William Randolph Hearst had a trust fund and a very large house. I had a Brother electric typewriter, a stapler, and an absolutely suffocating amount of free time. I was in fourth grade when I launched The Neighborhood News, which I will remind you predated the internet, Substack, and the entire concept of a personal brand by roughly thirty years. I was ahead of my time. I was also nine. The editorial concept was simple: it would be like Disney Adventures magazine, only local, only typed by me, and only distributed to people within reasonable bicycle distance. I covered the things that mattered. Who got a new dog. What the Hendersons were building in their backyard (a deck — I ran a follow-up). Weather observations. A review of the cul-de-sac, which I rated three out of five stars and noted "needs more shade." I typed every word myself, which for those of you born after 1995 means I hit physical keys that struck an ink ribbon against paper, and if I made a mistake I had to use a small bottle of white correction fluid that smelled like something you weren't supposed to inhale but definitely did a little. Each issue took the better part of a Saturday. I charged a quarter. My circulation peaked at eleven subscribers, all of whom were neighbors who I believe paid mostly out of pity and a desire for me to go away so they could finish their yard work. But I didn't care. I had readers. I had a distribution route. I had, at age nine, a stronger sense of content strategy than most marketing departments I would later encounter as an adult. When I eventually had to shut down operations — due to what I will describe as "market forces" but was actually my mom telling me I needed to go outside and stop typing — I folded the enterprise with dignity. I did not cry. I was a professional. The typewriter, I kept.
I always think it's a good sign when a book doesn't take long for me to read and I can tell you honestly that I have rattled my way through this, enjoying myself along the way. It helps that it's not a long book but it sure is packed - with wit, observations, confessions from start to finish. Its format too is designed to make the book accessible, being split into manageable chapters, all dealing with a different point, usually taken from Jason's life.
The incidents vary, some being from childhood where he showed his precocious qualities by creating a neighbourhood newspaper and his own athletic games, through to more life-defining moments like being knocked off a bike and embracing fatherhood. Each chapter is a clearly defined discussion which draws on Jason's experience, all described in Jason's own distinct voice. And this is the strength of the book, Jason's voice, because it is entertaining and funny and droll and dry and I found myself chuckling away in places at a turn of phrase or an observation and the way that it had all been put together.
There's some serious life stuff here, the nuts and bolts, like close brushes with death and other unexpected life-altering swerve balls that threaten to push even the most balanced individual to teeter on life's tightrope. It's all related with humour although this doesn't detract.
My favourite retelling is that of Miss Kelley, the music teacher and her generosity towards a pupil in giving him her coat for warmth. Of course, the focus is on the fact that she is a role model and a decent human being as teachers should be to their pupils; however, there is a twist to this tale and a lesson (excuse the pun!) to be learned and in this instance, it is not the pupil who is the recipient of the schooling! Very funny!
One thing to comment on is, in the synopsis, mention is made of undiagnosed generalized anxiety disorder being at the heart of this collection but I didn't get "anxiety" from my reading; in fact, I read the synopsis before writing the review and was notionally surprised by this. That's not to deny that to Jason Ramshaw, it is obviously one of the things that has shaped him, and whilst it may not have made his life easy, it has made it unique.
A good read.