If I say that I am not a big Hitchhiker’s fan, I don’t want you to get me wrong: I am comparing fandom with the fandom of people like my friend, Brenda, who memorized the entire radio show (British edition) by heart and can still reel it off, if you give her the right cue.

I do like these books but I am not in that class.

Some of my favorite things about these books:

• I love that the mice are the ones in charge.
• I love that the meaning of life is 42.¹
• The passage in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish about the truck driver who has an unlimited number of words for rain because it’s always raining where he is – which he doesn’t realize is because he is the rain god.² I talk about that passage far more than I should.

Why do we love crazy books (and TV shows) about chaos? I am particularly drawn to these books and Good Omens and the Night Vale books³; to TV shows like Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Good Place and Doctor Who; and to movies like Everything Everywhere All at Once⁴. I did not like the Hitchhiker’s movie – I thought they got Marvin all wrong and it just felt… I don’t know… tame…? Like the Good Omens TV show just felt… I don’t know… tame…? The reason these things work is because they feel edgy and wrong, which is what made Dirk Gently work.

I was looking into Bibliotherapy earlier this year – maybe that’s what I could do with my life? but it seems like you can’t monetize it without selling out – and learned that one of the principles is that reading about something you’re going through can help you process it. So you recommend a book about parents getting divorced to a child whose parents are getting divorced, or a book about a woman who breaks free from an abuser to a woman in a shelter – and perhaps that’s why I like books about chaos, because my life feels chaotic sometimes, and reading about it, and about it resolving to some extent later, makes my chaos feel reasonable.

So if your today feels chaotic – your sister-in-law put you in charge of mashing the potatoes but wants to micromanage you; your teenaged nephew is sneaking the rum for the eggnog up to his room; your snockered uncle wants to tell you about his political or religious views – maybe you need to take a little break: grab a flashlight and your copy of Hitchhiker’s Guide and lock yourself in a closet for a few minutes of chaos.

Trust me: Thanksgiving will feel much simpler after you deal with some Vogons.

1. Saw a Quora once where someone pointed out that 42 is the ASCII for * which stands for “wildcard” or “whatever you want it to be” – in other words, the meaning of life is whatever you want it to be. ↩︎
2. Want a laugh? Google “book truck driver rain god.” ↩︎
3. Yeah, yeah, I know, podcast first – but I’ve never actually listened the podcast and didn’t discover it until the books had come out. My favorite scene – from I don’t know which book – is the one where the mother is teaching her teenaged shape-changing son how to drive. Aside from him turning into a wolf spider at the beginning, it so perfectly encapsulated the mother-teenaged son relationship. I took a picture of those pages and sent them to my sister who was teaching her child to drive at the time. I particularly liked how the son wanted to drive, he just didn’t want to learn how to drive. Golden. ↩︎
4. A movie about which everyone has an opinion! You either love it – or you hate it and maybe so much that you didn’t even finish it. I hated it until the Racatouie scene and then all of a sudden, something clicked and I went Ohhhhh, and loved it. I particularly liked the scene with the rocks. Rocks! Who doesn’t laugh at rocks! But I couldn’t get my sister in law to watch it again. ↩︎