(It's My F---ing Birthday unfolds in seven state-of-my-life addresses a hapless high school art teacher writes to herself on consecutive birthdays. Through outrageously funny years of needling parents, self-absorbed boy-friends, riots, O.J., and Monica, she navigates a circuitous (and ultimately successful) route to happiness in a world where everything seems to conspire to the contrary.

On the first page of It's My F---ing Birthday, the unnamed narrator initiates a new tradition: every year she will write "a personal state of the union to help me chart my profits and losses." We get these annual reports in chapters, from "Thirty-Six" to the concluding "Forty mmmmppphhh." In between lie several years of angst-ridden dating and parental torment in the already hallowed tradition of Bridget Jones's Diary. There are two differences: author Merrill Markoe, who spent many years writing for David Letterman (and collecting many Emmy awards), has a considerably darker comic vision than Helen Fielding. And she also resists the temptation to pair her narrator off in the service of a happy ending. In fact, this is one woman who finds out she's happier on her own: "One great thing I have noticed about living all by myself: All of my annoying habits seem to have disappeared." --Claire Dederer

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