By Joselin Linder

Heather Donahue is funnier than me. I think this is important to note because as I read her memoir, Growgirl: How My Life After The Blair Witch Project Went to Pot (Gotham), I was harboring a slight ribbon of jealousy that made me very quick to notice any flaw, any ebb in her flow or glitch in her matrix. I’m kind of bitchy like that.

However, to be honest, by its end, I really enjoyed the time I spent in Donahue’s head and world. She's funny without self-deprecation or malice. After a star-making turn as the girl from The Blair Witch Project in 1999, she figures out that no one wants to hire a dead girl.

So Donahue moves to the country to grow weed for lack of a better idea. Her fast-paced memoir covers a trip to Burning Man, falling in and out of love, holding the hand of a dying woman and singing the only verse she knows of "Amazing Grace" with a compulsive abandon, starting a girl band, losing a turtle and getting a dog. Oh, and avoiding the legal pitfalls of building an extensive growroom for pot plants.

Donahue spins a good yarn. She brings you into her world and then points out what's funny about it. And you laugh with her, because that’s basically how life should be - hilarious.

About a fourth of the book is devoted to Donahue as she evolves into a fairly competent “growgirl,” but the rest, while engaging, is a little light on substance. For example, it’s hard to get a handle on how she feels about an early relationship that falls apart and reoccurs throughout the book. There aren't any great epiphanies and, by the story’s end, Donahue seems no closer in her quest to find herself than she was at the beginning.

There are opportunities for love affairs in the book, including a near-miss with those pot plants. While Donahue seems genuinely hopeful for their growth and well-being, particularly on a monetary level, she never really loves them, or even likes them all that much. Her relationships with men as well as her new community similarly fall short. She remains wholly untethered. And even at the end, when she moves in with a new boyfriend, the relationship feels convenient at best, a way to sort of tie up the book without “tying up” the book’s narrator.

Still, Donahue has written a very entertaining book complete with out-loud laughter and the kind of adventures you wish you had the balls to have. And even better, it's full of heart and hope.

Joselin Linder is the author of The Stoned Family Robinson

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