For several months now, I have been waiting for the review of Bettyville from the New York Times Book Review. Here it is. This is a nice moment and I am definitely opening up a box of Little Debbies. Thanks.

"Big-time magazine editor leaves New York City to care for his ailing yet feisty mother in their old-timey Midwestern hometown. The premise sounds like fodder for a laugh-track sitcom. Hodgman���s gorgeously constructed memoir, however, couldn���t be further from a pat Hollywood confection.
In ���Bettyville,��� Hodgman vividly depicts Paris, Mo., pop. 1,246, a small town easing into obsolescence. Against this backdrop, he creates an unforgettable portrait of his mother, Betty���a strong-willed nonagenarian struggling against the slow-motion breakdown of her mind and body. Hodgman evokes her with wit and tenderness, gently mocking her tendency to eat ���enough for a camp of lumberjacks in the Maine woods��� or her certainty that she ���has not had what she considers a successful hair appointment since around 1945.��� Even as they drive each other crazy, their mutual affection is ever-present: ������You���re my buddy,��� I tell her. ���Am I?��� she asks. ���You know I wouldn���t want just another damn sweet old lady,��� I say.���
A bundle of contradictions, Betty is both curmudgeonly and compassionate; an irreverent straight-talker who, along with her husband, Big George, can���t bring herself to acknowledge���much less accept���her son���s sexuality. With bracing honesty, Hodgman eloquently chronicles the devastating psychic toll of this silence: He struggles to open up to his romantic partners, and later falls into substance abuse. ���Where do the hidden things go? Not away. Nothing goes away,��� Hodgman writes. ���Shame is inventive,��� he recalls reading in a book. ���Shame can make a joke. It can reach for a bottle. It can trip you up when you don't even know it is there.���
Despite his travails, Hodgman writes without an ounce of self-pity or desire for retribution. ���I can never be a person who has not made mistakes,��� he says. ���But I can be someone honest who has lived through them: one of those who look you square in the eye and say, ���This is how it has been, and it is O.K.������