Yikes. I wish I could explain why I read this book. Maybe because subconsciously I knew Rory Gilmore read it? Maybe because it was in my audiobook app's queue, even though I don't remember adding it? Maybe because even after it started and I realized how much I hated it, I noticed I was already halfway through, and I might as well finish it?
If you, too, are a child of the 80s and grew up on Helen Keller jokes, skip this book. I'm not defending them, but it just makes it too difficult to take her seriously as a narrator because the book was at times so dull that old Helen Keller jokes were all I could think about. I was immensely disappointed by how uninteresting the book was, given how interesting I expected her life to be. So many of the gritty details of her learning to sign and speak and read are quickly brushed over, but she dedicated an entire chapter to a time when she accidentally plagiarized a story as a child; she writes as though it were the worst thing that ever happened to her, even worse than, oh...I don't know...GOING BLIND?! And the boringness aside, she is not a likable narrator; she sets the stage for her life story with a description of her family's Southern plantation and her constant torture of her black childhood companion who could be a character in a Harriet Beecher Stowe novel.
Books I Can't Even (apologies for the use of Internet cliches) is a recurring post on books I absolutely could not finish, usually after several attempts.