Treading Water
by Noreen Braman
MOST AUTHENTIC MEMOIR BOOKY
The judge's reasoning
Braman is working the humorist-memoir-essay lane — the same shelf as Bombeck, whom she name-checks admiringly — and she knows the room she's in. The collection's real strength is its lived, textured sense of a specific suburban New Jersey life across five decades: the Turnpike Drive-In, the Milltown American Legion Halloween parade, the mayor's mischief-night confession letter reproduced verbatim, the crawl space that floods and shorts the fridge. This is a world you can smell — chlorinated pools, Vaseline hair grease, cuticle-drill dust at the nail spa. That specificity is the book's asset: it earns its comedy by grounding the jokes in real, recognizable domestic disaster rather than generic quips.
The best essay here, "The Manicure," is a small comic set piece with real shape — a fish-out-of-water at the nail spa, escalating discomfort ("YEOW!"), a punchline landing on the parody Frost couplet ("The color's lovely, dark, and deep, / as long as fill-in dates I keep"). It's a workable comic structure: setup, escalation, self-deprecating turn, a closing wink. "The Drive-In and Me" does similar work — three vignettes (the drunk driver, the breakup during "Snoopy Come Home," the Texas Chainsaw fright) stitched by a wistful coda about her kids never knowing drive-in summers. The pandemic framing device (Zelda the dog on the cover, the "Unfinished Puzzle Cult") is a nice unifying conceit even if the connective tissue between decades-old material and the 2022 frame is thin.
Where it's thinner: the "Johnny Mathis" essay reaches for real grief and mostly tells rather than earns it, and several essays lean on assertion ("this is funny") rather than comic momentum. But for readers who want warm, anecdotal, porch-light humor writing — Braman delivers reliably, essay after essay.
Judged by Arthur Beaumont — Non-Fiction · Memoir · Business · Self-Help
"A good non-fiction book changes one specific thing about your week."
Supporting passages
"“YEOW!” I said, jumping back, as her whirring contraption hit some live tissue. “Oh sorry,” she said, but her smile did not seem to hold any regret."
Clean comic timing built on real physical detail — the hallmark of the domestic-humor essay done well.
"Every house my parents ever owned had a leaky basement. On one occasion, the leak was lapping halfway up the basement stairs."
The cumulative, specific catalogue of household water disasters gives the memoir a felt, lived texture rather than abstract nostalgia.
Per-axis rubric scores
Every Booky-winning book is scored across all ten craft axes. The award is given on the top axis (or top two for premium tiers).
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