After a While You Just Get Used to It

Praise

“This true story is like the best craziest-good novel you ever read. Knapp’s natural talent wraps advanced techniques of fiction and creative nonfiction into a big bang of story-telling. Miss this one and you miss an exploding universe of family goodies.”
—Clyde Edgerton, author of Raney and Papadaddy’s Book For New Fathers
 
“A funny, slightly disturbing, wistful read that could only happen in the South.  If you grew up below the Mason-Dixon line, this book will make you nostalgic for the South, its eccentrics, and reunions that include a cooler of beer, someone getting out of jail, and an itchy dog.”
—Adele Levine, author of Run, Don’t Walk
 
“Despite a life as hectic as a hurricane, and at times as foreboding as a Florida swamp, Gwendolyn Knapp’s After A While You Get Used To It is a hilarious, insightful reminder of what the best memoirs can offer, imposing a sense of order and much-needed catharsis on the chaos of life.”
 – Josh Hanagarne, author of The World’s Strongest Librarian
 
“Gwendolynn Knapp may not be the hoarder her mother is, but lucky for us readers she has been hoarding sidesplittingly hilarious stories about bad family holidays, bad boyfriends, and bad bowels and unloads them all in her romp-of-a-read memoir. To open her book is to unpack a warehouse full of laughter.”
—Jamie Brickhouse, author of Dangerous When Wet: A Memoir
 
“Wielding a twisted wit and incisive eloquence, Knapp forges her way to adulthood through the suffocation of stuff. Deliciously rich prose and tart turns of phrase make the John Waters-esque characters of her life real on the page, in the end creating a coffee-stained ink-splattered dog-eared love letter to her family and the scruffy little packrat in all of us.”
—Shawna Kenney, author of I Was a Teenage Dominatrix
 
“I love this book. I love it. In one paragraph, I’m laughing my ass off; the next, I’m audibly shocked, saying, “Ohmygod, did that really just happen?”; and the next, I’m knocked off my seat by moments so poetic and profound they take my breath away. Knapp is a wonderful craftswoman; each essay builds on the next to paint her growing up and growing into this wild, beautiful dysfunction, and at the heart of it all is a love so enormous it seeps off the pages. Here is what it means to be a family. Here is what it means to be alive.”
—Megan Stielstra, author of Once I Was Cool
 
“Gwendolyn Knapp’s writing manages to be both darkly acerbic and incredibly warm — reading her memoir, I found myself cycling back and forth between cackling and covering my mouth in puritanical shock. After A While You Just Get Used To It perfectly captures the relentless, crazy-making love only possible (and endurable) among family.”
—Katie Heaney, author of Never Have I Ever

“I’ve long believed that someone would eventually write a book about what it’s like to grow up as a normal person in normal old Florida — a state filled with earnest, lighthearted folks who each and every day strive to bring a little sunshine into the lives of others. This is not that book.”
—Wayne Curtis, author of And a Bottle of Rum: A History of the New World in 10 Cocktails