Review of 'Between You & Me' - Confessions of a Comma Queen

'Between you & me - Confessions of a comma queen' by Mary Norris was on my must-read list for a long time. I finally ordered the physical copy from Amazon and it coincided with the start of my book bingo. I chose it for the 'Memoir' category of my book bingo although it is only part-memoir.

Written by a copyeditor who worked with the New Yorker for over 30 years, the book was bound to be a class apart. There were several instances of the author finding an error in some great writer's work, and she lists the sentence and error.

She comes across as a real nerd who devotes one whole chapter to pencils and a museum of sharpeners. She writes to a pencil manufacturer to lodge a complaint about a particular batch of their pencils showing how persnickety she is. Yes! The company does write back with a detailed explanation, which she prints in this book.

Her chapter on gender is accompanied by the story of how her brother started identifying as a woman and so was a 'trans' person. She outlines her difficulty in referring to 'him' as 'her' and how her unwitting mistakes in pronoun reference cut the brother-turned-sister to the core.

I loved her chapter on commas the best. As a copyeditor, I've been rather fascinated with the 17 rules of comma usage ever since I began my career. I was able to appreciate this chapter probably due to my grasp of the use of commas. She also devotes a chapter to hyphens, but that didn't appeal to me as much. She talks about the difference between an umlaut and a diaeresis—a couple of punctuation marks we don't often come across.

I took a few days to finish this book. One needs to absorb the information carefully and it is not a quick read. It is partly a reference book, one that I would recommend to copyeditors who have considerable experience in the field.

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