Renee Burns Lonner, author, is a management consultant for television newsrooms and a licensed psychotherapist based in Los Angeles. When she is not seeing patients or trying to help journalists maintain their sanity despite the stories they are covering, she is writing. Prior to the pandemic, her written work was serious, appearing in professional publications, newspapers, and a textbook. The pandemic changed all that.
In fact, the pandemic created in her a need for therapy of the literary kind. For Renee, the best humor has always been what Jerry Seinfeld described as “about nothing.” That is, the funny things that happen in your home with a partner, with your children, in the market, waiting in line at the theater, anywhere. When your friends at dinner say hilarious things and your thought is “Why isn’t anyone recording this?” She admires the likes of Nora Ephron, Whoopi Goldberg, David Sedaris, Lily Tomlin, Jerry Seinfeld, Tina Fey, Wanda Sykes, and so many other wonderful, warm comedians who are somehow able to put their finger right on our culture’s pulse.
Her admiration for these humorists, combined with a need for comic relief, led directly to Renee’s first book, “If You Give a Man a Tesla: a Parody.” This small but mighty work (34 pages) is a tongue-in-cheek look at a particular intersection of gender and culture – how men’s lifelong fascination with cars that go Vroom has shifted to fascination with a quiet computer on wheels. She wrote it in the style of a children’s book, complete with awesome artwork, and thought it would be her only book.
(Side note - meanwhile, she was writing short essays on all kinds of subjects. Well, to be fair, mostly about family, since they have been so generous with material. Her humor/human interest essays have been published by Medium, LOL Comedy, The MockingOwl Roost, and the Erma Bombeck Writers’ Workshop blog and can be accessed on this website under “More Works by Author.”)
Fascination with our culture and how we deal with aging – mixed with intermittent horror – led to her second book, “We’re sorry to inform you that . . . YOUR FORTIES ARE OVER.” This one is appropriate for women turning 50, obviously, but also for women in their 50s and beyond. Though this book is humorous, Renee sprinkled in some sound advice, delivered in easily digestible portions – easy to digest and easy to ignore.
Both books are available on Amazon and at select Southern California Barnes & Noble Bookstores.
