A Girlfriend Memoir
by Jennifer Preuss
-Memoir, Humor
Just released: May 16, 2017
Amazon | Goodreads
When life makes no sense, and the world is going straight to hell, a girl knows she can count on her best friends
There are all types of friends. Rich friends. Poor friends. Fair weather friends—and then there are Best Friends—your BFF’s. Meet Jennifer, a wannabe soap opera star, new to LA and waiting tables in Century City. She makes three new friends, and they turn out to be inseparable.
Together they go from one hilarious adventure to another; crashing concerts and movie star bars, lingerie shopping, and laughing about men’s shortcomings, all revealed through the razor-sharp, self-deprecating humor of the author. Life is good, even laugh-out-loud funny, and Jen discovers the real meaning of friendship. But when life throws them a cruel curve ball, which rocks them to their very core . . . is friendship enough?
Life Would Suck Without You is a feel-good story that will make you laugh and cry, Jennifer Preuss’s comical and heartwarming book tells the tale of an inseparable group of four women who navigate their 20s and 30s, dealing with life, death and all the things in between.
Excerpt:
Chapter One
Perhaps I should back up a little bit. I moved to Los Angeles from Philadelphia, by way of Miami for college, to be a soap opera star. Yes, that’s right. Most people who want to act dream of being a movie star or landing on a sitcom. Not me. I wanted to be on General Hospital. The year was 1999. My first job was waiting tables at Houston’s Restaurant in the Century City Mall.
“Full hands out!” That’s what we shouted as we exited the kitchen at the Century City Houston’s Restaurant. That meant we didn’t have an empty hand to take anything out for anyone to his or her tables. There were so many rules you needed to know at this restaurant. It was unlike any other waiting tables job I had ever had. I worked at many restaurants as a hostess and server since I was sixteen. Very much a people person, I loved interacting with my customers. Only they weren’t customers at Houston’s. They were my guests. No. They were the restaurants’ guests and me, nothing but a humble servant. It was my first week without shadowing a trainer, and it was overwhelming, to say the least.
We only had a three-table section. This should be easy. In college, I had six, sometimes seven tables in my section and I prided myself on my excellent service. But Houston’s was unlike any other restaurant I had ever worked. It was run like the military. I will never forget ordering someone’s lunch on the computer and hyperventilating because I had to get drinks to table 33, a “guest request” to someone not in my section (still my responsibility, though), and ring in a long order with more modifications than ingredients. As I tried to run out of the kitchen to get the guest request to the table, the manager shoved two plates in my hand reminding me not to leave the kitchen without full hands. When I arrived at my table, they yelled at me for not having their drinks. I promised to check on them.
“This might sound silly, but I can get back here much faster if you give me your empty bread plates to carry to the kitchen,” I said. They looked at me like I was insane as I grabbed the untouched plates so I could have “full hands in” and made my way back to the kitchen. A manager stopped me and would not let me into the kitchen because I did not have FULL hands! Bread plates or “tip plates” as they were called, were small enough to grab other things. I scurried around the restaurant trying to find plates that needed clearing so I could get back to the drink area to make sure my drinks were going out to my table. I was so overwhelmed. I wasn’t sure how much more of this I could take. Maybe I wasn’t cut out to wait tables in Los Angeles? I found a few more big plates to clear and got back to the kitchen. When I put the plates down, I started crying. Like “ugly girl” crying.
