Judging by the cover, you might guess that this memoir would read like "Bridget-Jones-Meets-Coffee-Tea-or-Me."
By Lori Jakiela
Warner Books, ($12.95)
The image of a jaunty flight attendant standing on a suitcase, her head cropped off, looks likes it should carry a warning label: "Chick Lit Alert."
But don't let appearances fool you.
This is a marvel of a memoir, both laugh-out-loud funny and sweetly moving about a Western Pennsylvania girl who escapes her small-town roots for the lights of the big city.
Lori Jakiela, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh-Greensburg, grew up in Trafford, population 3,002, a place she was dying to escape.
But the characters in Trafford are more interesting than the ones she meets in exciting New York. There are zombie wannabes who line up for auditions at George Romero movies, the preening pre-teen beauty contestants, the horny Santa Claus. And best of all, her pill-popping nun of an aunt, who gets bounced from the convent for detox.
"My father's sister was a nun," she writes. "She was also a regular at Narcotics Anonymous.
" 'They have their own way of dealing with things like this,' " my mother said, as if the Catholic Church were the Mafia and my aunt had turned stoolie."
This is Jakiela's introduction to how the family nun moves into her house temporarily, taking over Lori's bedroom, plastered with Shaun Cassidy posters.
The most delicately drawn character is her father, a man who prefers the company of poodles to people, who is sweet to beggars but not to neighbors, who dreamed of being a singer but ends up a disillusioned laborer.
Jakiela has her own dreams of being a writer in New York, but takes a detour as a flight attendant, even though she is afraid of flying.
The job hazards include having a dressing-slathered salad thrown at her backside and being licked on the neck.
She comes home, ditching her big city dreams, when her father gets sick, and the tone turns bittersweet without ever becoming schmaltzy.
This memoir brims with both small-town heart and big-city sophistication.
First Published: February 12, 2006, 5:00 a.m.