Her father is a taxidermist with an equal interest in living animals, and once sent her to school with a flock of turkeys that he insisted were “jumbo quail”. In it Lawson dealt obliquely with her mental illness, reframing it as the cultural by-product of her delightfully eccentric family. Lawson’s first book, a memoir of growing up dirt poor in rural Texas, was a hugely popular hit in 2012 and sat at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. In other words, she is in an abusive relationship with her own head. Lawson has been diagnosed as “a high-functioning depressive with anxiety disorder and mild-self harm issues”. In other words she has a perfectly good grip on reality, if reality is mostly a scary place where something very bad is about to happen. She never hallucinates: if she thinks about how cool it would be to have monkey butlers, that’s because she also knows it’s never going to happen, not least because they’d eat all the peanuts before passing them round. She is not schizophrenic, nor even a little bit bipolar. Lawson came out several years ago as being “mentally ill” but what has given the Texan her particular appeal – her blog gets millions of hits a month – is that her illnesses are of a common or garden variety. The “furious” bit is important to Lawson because it is a measure of the effort and determination that goes into trying to feel OK when you have a brain that is busy trying to kill you. Not mildly happy, or even mindfully happy, but furiously happy. No, Rory is Lawson’s personal happiness coach, a gurning reminder that, no matter how awful life seems, you always have the choice to be happy.

He – Lawson tells us that his name is Rory – is much more than a charming novelty or a “wacky” talking point. Arms outstretched, mouth fixed in an ecstatic grin, this is a raccoon determined that the evening will go with a swing.

O n the front of Jenny Lawson’s book is a stuffed raccoon looking like the most thrilled guest at a surprise birthday party.

Jenny lawson broken