Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

I don't remember ever seeing an entire entire episode of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, but I can remember bits and pieces and of it, flashes from my early childhood and it just seemed to gross me out. I am not sure why. Oh wait a minute...now I think I might now why, maybe part of it at least. The star of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was Louise Lasser and she was married to that creepy Woody Allen who married his step-daughter. Well, okay not his technical step-daughter, but it's as gross as gross can be.
So I guess that's why I don't like anything to do with Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman. The whole Woody Allen Connection. Even though the show was off the air before my sixth birthday, it just makes me ill to even think about it.
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman has nothing to do with Will Grayson, Will Grayson, however, except for the fact that the structures of the titles are the same, which means absolutely nothing. All the same, at first I didn't want to read the book because of the Mary Hartman imagery.
But Miss Kelly recommend it to me and, as I have written, Miss Kelly is quite the wonderful recommender.
This was another one of those books that I had a hard time putting down. Just as Miss Kelly had told me, it is unlike anything I had ever read.
Tiny Cooper is a huge football-playing, musical-loving gay high school dude. He is larger than life in all ways. His best friend is the rather insecure and afraid Will Grayson. Will has two rules for getting along in life. 1. Don't care too much and 2. Shut up.
I guess that he's right...you do stay out of trouble if you follow those rules. But you don't enjoy life much, at least Will doesn't seem to enjoy much of anything.
There's another Will Grayson that comes into the picture. He's a gay loner dude.
The thing is, I can't really describe the plot. As I said from the beginning, I am not good at that. Better to read about the plot from other places. Our local paper had a review of it this week and it has good summary.
So that's the plot, now let me get back to how I feel about it.
The book is written by two authors: John Green, who tells the story of the Will Grayson who is Tiny's best friend. Green wrote a lot of very acclaimed books. The only one I tried to read (twice even) was Looking for Alaska, which I didn't like at all, but I loved Green's writing in this book, so maybe I will go back and read another of his books, just not Alaska again.
The other author is David Levithan who wrote Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist with Rachel Cohn. I loved Nick and Norah, the book and the movie, but the book was better! I tried to read Boy Meets Boy when it first came out but I didn't like it. I just put Are We There Yet on hold so we will see how that is. Because I am so excited to read more stuff from both of these authors because I loved Will Grayson so much.
For me the end did jump the shark because the ending is just so over the top...but then again...so is Tiny Cooper!
The only part I didn't like was that TWICE Tiny Cooper shouts, "TINY COOPER HATES 'OVER THE RAINBOW'!" Yeah. That bugged me. But maybe he never heard Judy sing it in later years...those later year renditions are when it is amazing, like this one.
The icing on the cake for me was in the Acknowledgements section in the back.
This one really touched me:
We acknowledge that being the person God made you cannot separate you from God's love.
Yeah, that was pretty cool and so true.
I totally recommend this book.