Fat Girls in Lawn Chairs

I've been stuck at the "guilt" level of the Critical Monkey Contest for a while now, and finally decided it was high time to get on to the "anger" stage, so I picked up a book that struck me as different from the last one that I wouldn't have ordinarily read and didn't particularly like (It's Not That I'm Bitter). This new book, Fat Girls in Lawn Chairs by Cheryl Peck, looked different in almost every way, except that it's also a collection of autobiographical essays. I figured there'd be none of the moaning about not being a size 6 in this one; in fact the title made it sound like the essays would be the exact opposite of the not-bitter-but-obsessed-with-physical-appearance ones.

Well, it turned out that there wasn't that much about body size in the book. What there was, instead, was a confusing list of terms for her siblings (the wee, the unwee, the least wee, etc.) and some stories about what they did, not at all in the David Sedaris tradition of "look how weird my family is," which is what I'd hoped for. I had a hard time figuring out why she talked about her siblings at all. In one essay, her sister tells Cheryl that she used to go into her room and touch her things. The only good part is Cheryl's response: "Touching my things is no great challenge; I keep them all out in the middle of the floor where I can find and touch them myself."

Some of the essays are about her cat, who has a silly name ("Babycakes") and doesn't do anything particularly amusing, at least not to me--and I'm usually a sucker for cat stories. Others are about what she did when she was young, and these are all pretty banal:
"I was prone to nightmares as a child and it was not uncommon for the bears and the tigers to start crawling out of the top of the wardrobe and vault across the room onto my bed and try to maul me in my sleep. I would wake up in hysterics and my mother would come running into the room to find out why I was crying and even when I pointed out the lions she never once saw one."

I like only two things in her essays about her relationship. One is that she calls her female partner "my Beloved," which is a nicer and more dignified term than many others I've heard. The other is this passage about her father:
"I have never come out to my father. I am forty-eight and he is seventy....He knows. I know he knows.
We have a covenant of trust, my father and I. I do not present him with emotional, word-intensive problems he cannot solve. He does not make anti-gay remarks in my presence and sometimes he has this--mischievous--almost expectant--little smile on his face when someone else does.
She'll get 'em--she's good with words."

But there isn't nearly enough evidence of her being "good with words" in this collection of autobiographical essays. Really, if it weren't for Sedaris and Anne Lamott, I believe I'd be about done with the whole genre right now. Do any other good collections of present-day autobiographical essays even exist?