You’ll Grow Out of It is a series of autobiographical essays by professional funny person Jessi Klein. I picked it up on pub day entirely because of things I’d been hearing about it, celebrities I love talking about it on Twitter, and several great reviews from sources I trust (i.e. the A.V. Club and Sloane Crosley at the New York Times). For a time, Klein was a writer on Saturday Night Live and she’s now a head writer for Inside Amy Schumer. I adore funny, honest women and I have an entire shelf dedicated to humorous memoirs by women, so I had to pick this up and I immediately thought I was going to love it.

However, I was rather disappointed at how long it took me to really feel the magic of this memoir. As I mentioned earlier, it’s a series of essays. There are an astounding twenty-four of them in a book that’s less than three-hundred pages. And well…that’s because some of them aren’t really fully formed, at least the ones in the beginning.

Klein’s hatred of baths, her memories of watching her mother put on perfume, the notion that she’s never grown out of being a tomboy, all start out relatable and wonderful. But then they stop short and the “moral” or “lesson” or “epiphany” of those moments gets slapped on at the end. It’s a jarring way to end each story and I felt like I was missing something, as though a page or two had disappeared somewhere in editing. I would have stopped reading after the third or fourth time that happened, but with the book being rather short (for me), I didn’t see the harm in trudging through the rest of it.

While Klein also includes really touching essays (I cried during her fertility struggles entitled “The Infertility Chapters”), some of the stories were very…rich white lady-ish. One chapter is set at Miraval Spa, a wellness resort in Arizona featured in an episode of Oprah. Another talks about the expensive and tiring exercise trend known as the “Bar Method.” It was in those moments that I had trouble connecting. I come from a lower middle class upbringing and while I live in Boston, I’m certainly not affluent by any means. Those particular essays painted a picture of a socioeconomic status that I’ve never experienced and honestly, probably never will.

For example, she mentions that doing Bar Method classes the optimal five day a week would be $180 per week and I felt my heart seize up in my chest. Granted, that particular essay emphasizes the financial and physical strains put upon women to look attractive (in the sense of what’s attractive in the eyes of the media), but many women don’t have the luxury of going to Bar Method five times a week – whether due to time, financial, or other constraints. Some women work out in their homes with soup cans (me). Others run or walk around the block. Or some women don’t exercise because they’re so damn tired (also me sometimes). It was just a very privileged and affluent example that left a rather bad taste in my mouth, something that happened quite a few times.

But the book really hits its stride around the halfway point, where things start to get deeper and the essays longer. Klein talks about aging, the pressures to find someone with whom to spend her life, and her pregnancy fears. Those felt very real to me and I think are issues that will resonate with many women. It’s in those essays that You’ll Grow Out of It won me over.

I think my favorite essay is “Ma’am,” in which Klein tries to figure out when a “miss” becomes a “ma’am.” Extremely long passage ahead, but oh, is it beautiful:

Ma’am is double insulting because we hear men being called sir all day. And sir is awesome. We long for sir. Sir is what knights are and what Paul McCartney is. Sir sounds like you are sitting at a castle round table eating a rack of lamb. Sir means you are respected and maybe a little bit feared. No one fears ma’am, except in the sense that they may be worried oh no what if this ma’am starts hitting on me, then what will I do?

Men are called sir starting from when they’re old enough to be called anything, and they stay sir through old age. Men don’t have to deal with the fact that at some point in their early midlife, they will find themselves tossed into a linguistic system that will let them know, in no uncertain terms, that in the eyes of the world, essentially, they’ve begun to die. When you’re called sir, you’re being called the same thing that James Bond is called.

For a lot of guys, being called sir is the closest thing they’ll ever get to being an actual man.

When I’m called ma’am, I’m being called the same thing that Senator Barbara Boxer is being called, and she’s seventy-five. Except scratch that. Even she famously got bent out of shape when she was addressed on the Senate floor as ma’am. She corrected the person, firmly asking to be called Senator instead of ma’am.

But if you’re not a senator, and have no plans to be one, and probably couldn’t be even if you wanted to because of some unfortunate YouTube videos where you do stand-up about your sex life, what do you ask to be called? We’ve never come up with a good alternative. But I know you can’t complain if you’re not trying to solve the problem yourself. So, may I offer:

Your Highness
Meryl
Khalessi
Queen
Miss Jackson (if you’re nasty)

The reason I liked the ma’am essay so much is that it talks about the coded meanings in language. Ma’am denotes age, but it’s also extremely broad. Ma’am could be used for a women in her late thirties who works in TV (Klein) or a senator in her seventies (Boxer). If you’re not a miss, you’re a ma’am, which translates that if you’re not young, you’re old. It’s jarring, especially since other people, whether they realize it or not, are making that distinction and decision as to what you are in order to decide how to address you. (Obviously, there are exceptions, such as Southerners. I was taught to call everyone ma’am and sir, unless others told me not to, simply out of politeness.)

I think the earlier essays try too hard to be funny and a bit lighthearted in order to get you to keep reading. “Oh, hey, see how breezy and cool I am,” says the book. But while quirky and a bit tongue-in-cheek, they’re all pretty shallow. There’s no depth in the essays, in Klein recounting memories of her childhood or breakups. It doesn’t go as far as it should, but if you keep reading and you’ve been “hooked,” Klein then gets into the deeper stuff – as if these more personal essays would have scared us off had they been used as openers rather than finishers. Honestly, I wanted more of them.

For example, Klein has an essay titled “Get the Epidural” and I’m sure you can guess at what it’s about. She expressed confusion and bewilderment when, while attending a childbirth education class, no one was opting to get an epidural during labor. Klein was worried that by getting an epidural, she was somehow failing already as a mother, that even hiring a night nurse was going to lessen her success at motherhood:

There is so much pressure on women around birth and labor and mothering to do it one way or another. It’s easy to believe the notion that having a baby demands complete and total sacrifice, and anything short of that is not enough. That if you’re not in pain, you’re selfish.

But here’s the thing: If you’re worried that skipping the pain of childbirth means you’re somehow cheating your baby, or yourself, you’re not. Because the truth is, life offers more than enough pain that you will not be able to skip. By the time you’ve had a kid, you’ve probably been through some of it already. The pain of breakups. The pain of rejection. The pain of being picked last for a team. The pain of hearing your parents fighting in the other room. When you have a baby, there will be plenty more pain. The pain of recovery, no matter how you give birth. The pain of nursing. The pain of not fitting into any old clothes. The pain of not even fitting into your maternity jeans. The pain of hearing your baby cry and not knowing how to fix it. The pain of wondering whether your partner still finds you attractive. The pain of arguing with your husband while your child is in the other room. The pain of knowing that you witnessed the very first moment of this beautiful person’s life, and that one day, hopefully at least a hundred years from now, there will inevitably be a last moment.

So really…

Get the epidural.

And even typing that up, though I have no children and I’m not even close to it, I’m crying on my keyboard.

As a women in her mid-twenties, I am frightened of my future. Truly and utterly frightened. And while I’m glad I have this awesome community and these lovely women as cohorts, I still worry about being alone for the rest of my life. Will I have children? Can I have children? Will I become my mother? The process of pregnancy scares the ever-loving shit out of me. Please bless me with genes that age gracefully and healthily because I’ve heard my mother’s hacking cough from over thirty years of smoking. I’ve seen my aunt ask me the same question three times because she has dementia. I’ve seen my grandfather’s health drop and his alcoholism spiral out of control (something that eventually led to his death last fall) because he was heartbroken over my grandmother’s death to cancer. These are things that keep me up at night and that help keep my therapist employed.

I’m a worrier by nature, unfortunately. I want to do everything right. I want a happy and healthy life. I don’t want my experience on this earth to be marred by struggles – failing to maintain a long-lasting and healthy relationship, failing to conceive and start a family, the heartbreak of illness. My biological clock is working overtime in all matter of ways as I fret over the kind of life I’ll live and of where I could go wrong, whether through ways I can or cannot control. But I appreciate Klein echoing these worries in her later essays; it makes me feel less alone. It makes me feel a bit more normal in my own fears because sometimes it’s hard to voice these things aloud to other people.

There are such pockets of tender and beautiful writing in You’ll Grow Out of It and I wanted more of them. I hope, should Klein write another book, we get more, but for now, readers will have to settle for the genuine revelations that are fewer and far between. You may have to push through 150 pages to get to them, but in my opinion, they’re worth it. I know I will keep those pages and those passages dog-eared, revisiting them when it’s 2am and my brain won’t stop cataloging what could go wrong for me as woman in the next twenty years. You’ll Grow Out of It serves as a great reminder that some aspects of being a woman are universal, that in the middle of the night, it’s entirely possible that we’re all agonizing over the same things.