2024 reads, #19. DID NOT FINISH. I’ve been a big fan of the psychotherapy process ever since starting my own sessions back in 2015, so much so that I’2024 reads, #19. DID NOT FINISH. I’ve been a big fan of the psychotherapy process ever since starting my own sessions back in 2015, so much so that I’ve spent a lot of time vaguely thinking about what it would be like to become a therapist myself (which, to be clear, I’m not planning on doing, because I’m already in my mid-fifties and wouldn’t want to yet again start all over in my career like that). That’s had me reading and really enjoying a number of books over the years by therapists specifically about the therapy process, mostly by the brilliant Irvin Yalom (but for more, see my reviews of Love’s Executioner, Creatures of a Day, and Staring at the Sun), as well as that contemporary book that got so much traction several years ago, Lori Gottlieb’s Maybe You Should Talk to Someone.
That made me think that Joshua Fletcher’s brand-new And How Does That Make You Feel? would be right up my alley, a book that promises to be a similar behind-the-scenes look at what an actual therapist is going through in their own head as they go through the process of analyzing and helping their clients, which I had especially high hopes for because it took forever for my name to finally come to the top of the reserve list at the Chicago Public Library, and typically books that popular tend to be pretty good as well. But alas, this turned out to be almost worthless, because Fletcher doesn’t actually provide any insights whatsoever here, but instead presents his inner voice as a series of “little people who live inside him” -- yes, just like the Disney children’s movie -- then doesn’t give these little people anything more insightful to say than such facile, obvious, kneejerk reactions like, “I’m scared of this guy!”, “I’m proud of her!”, and “I really have to pee!”
Jesus Christ, bro, are you telling me that a professional full-time therapist has absolutely nothing more interesting to share about their profession than childish little quips about his clients’ physical attributes and whether or not they stammer while they talk? Then again, I suppose this is partly my fault for not actually reading Fletcher’s bio before picking up the book, where I would’ve seen him proudly talking about his popular TikTok account; and that’s all a grown-up needs to hear to now know that they’re dealing with a glorified man-child and not an actual grown-up, which is exactly what this book feels like, like a little child trying to explain psychotherapy in ten-second snippets while doing his cutesy little cheerleader dance or whatever the hell those TikTok children are into these days. This is now the third contemporary book in a single week I’ve been forced to give up on before even making it 25 pages in, which makes me want to never pick up a book published after 2020 again the entire rest of my life; and while I know already that I won’t actually stick to that threat, certainly it’s just more evidence to me of how completely and totally contemporary literature has now permanently fallen into a disastrous pit of unreadable schlock, as we now all just become inured to a world where the marketing sociopaths are now the ones making all the book acquisition decisions anymore, and they aren’t greenlighting anyone who doesn’t have a TikTok account and writes at a third-grade level. Avoid, avoid, avoid; for the love of all that is holy, avoid. ...more
2023 reads, #90. So to understand where I was coming from when initially approaching this book, let me admit that I had no idea who Jennette McCurdy w2023 reads, #90. So to understand where I was coming from when initially approaching this book, let me admit that I had no idea who Jennette McCurdy was before reading this; for fellow clueless Gen-Xers, she was on one of those cloying children's shows from Nickelodeon that polluted the airwaves during the early '00s, back when we were too old to watch such shows ourselves but not yet old enough to have kids who watched those shows, where she played not the main character but the Kramer-esque wacky next-door neighbor who became the show's breakout star. This thus made it quite a shock to her former young fans when, a decade later, she wrote a tell-all memoir alleging that the show's creator, Dan Schneider, was a sexual predator who regularly got underaged girls drunk in order to take advantage of them, and that the Nickelodeon executive suite knew this and deliberately chose not to do anything about it since Schneider (who had five different shows on the network at the time) was making such an obscene amount of money for them. Oh yeah, and her mom happened to be completely off-the-rails batshit crazy, an unmedicated schizophrenic who among other things forced an eating disorder on McCurdy at the age of ten (after forcing her into a showbiz career she didn't want in the first place), used to shower her each night and check her genitals for "abnormalities" all the way up to the age of seventeen (while forced to share the tub with her 16-year-old brother who was receiving such an examination at the same time), and who was such an unrepentant and unapologetic hoarder that eventually McCurdy had to sleep on a roll-up exercise mat on the floor at night, because her mom had taken over virtually every inch of her bedroom with random detritus.
That's a lot for a single book, especially when you add McCurdy's decade of substance abuse issues after her mother's death from cancer; but the joyfully surprising thing here is that she takes it on with mastery, finesse and aplomb, putting together both a breezy and a devastating read that's easily one of my favorites out of the 100+ books I read this year. That's because McCurdy doesn't have even the slightest bit of hesitation about going warts-and-all here in this shockingly honest look at her life, by which I mean she not only spills the beans about all the abuse she suffered from all these people, but also makes it abundantly clear where she too has failed in life, where she has treated people terribly, where she had such a blinders-hobbled understanding of things like sexuality that she drove pretty much every person around her crazy (especially in most of the romantic relationships she's now been in as an adult, which she admits have almost all been because of either her own behavior or having such a stunted emotional life that she couldn't recognize terrible boyfriends before actually dating them).
But what really sells this, though, and what makes it so much different than so many of these other tell-all celebrity abuse memoirs, is that McCurdy maintains an astounding sense of compassion and empathy for the people she talks about, despite the book's salacious title; for example, although she admits that her mother was unambiguously a monster, who understood that she was mentally ill but deliberately chose not to seek treatment but instead inflict her insanity on her entire family, she also easily sees the circumstances that led to her being this way (in a nutshell, her own mother, who got it from her own mother, etc.), and holds a tremendous amount of love and caring for her at the heart of this otherwise always shocking litany of human abuses she details here in her never-not-fascinating trainwreck of a childhood. I'm fairly convinced that this is why this one shines so much brighter than other celebrity tell-alls of this type, and why it's had such staying power (I myself am reading it an entire year after it first came out, because it still continues to pop up in my Goodreads friends' reading lists at least once a week without fail); for while we all love to gawk at the car crash with tawdry Hollywood memoirs, here McCurdy is challenging us readers to a lot more than that, to understand how a person who did a tremendous amount of bad things can still have a good side we can celebrate, namely so that we too can see the good sides of ourselves whenever we also do bad things, as all humans do on a regular basis.
That's really what elevates this book here, is McCurdy taking such a hard look at herself at the same time she's chronicling all this abuse, whether from her family or Schneider or the executives of Nickelodeon (who literally offered her a third of a million dollars in hush money to stop writing this book), understanding that to forgive the people who have done us wrong is to ultimately forgive ourselves, for the times we in turn have wronged others. That's a much deeper message, and one a lot more of us can relate to than the usual "look at the living hell these people put me through" record these types of books typically are. That's why I'm not just giving it 5 stars but will be adding to my "Best Reads of 2023" list, soon to be unveiled over at my Mastodon account; for it's not just horrific and entertaining but also teaches us something about the world in general, even better for refusing to come up with a pat happy ending like so many of these mainstream memoirs are forced into. If you haven't yet read this difficult, often infuriating, but nonetheless sometimes laugh-out-loud funny book, I encourage you to do so as soon as you can....more
2023 reads, #89. DID NOT FINISH. I wouldn't call myself exactly a fan of comedian Maria Bamford -- her subject matter often gets a bit too surreal for2023 reads, #89. DID NOT FINISH. I wouldn't call myself exactly a fan of comedian Maria Bamford -- her subject matter often gets a bit too surreal for me, and her habit of delivering her punchlines in a demon-child whisper frequently annoys me -- but I find her funny enough that I wanted to read her new memoir focusing on mental illness issues, the cleverly titled Sure, I'll Join Your Cult. Unfortunately, though, when you take away the need to deliver jokes in a pronounced rhythm and while taking lots of pauses for audience reactions, this self-confessed bipolar OCD sufferer kind of just goes off the rails, giving us prose that's so packed with digressions and bulletpoint lists and jokey-joke joke joke JOOOOKES!!!!! that it eventually all becomes this stream-of-consciousness fog you can barely follow; and while I enjoyed the first chapter of this, even by page 30 I was completely and totally mentally wiped out by Bamford's exhausting Robin Williamsesque patter, and at that point needed to turn the book back in to the public library for the sake of my own mental health. If the idea of listening to a Maria Bamford standup set, while she screams it as fast as she possibly can while not even stopping for a breath, sounds like fun to you, then you should absolutely pick this up, because that's basically what this book is; for all the rest of us, perhaps stick to YouTube clips of her performances, plus of course the best thing she's ever done, the 2010s two-season Netflix absurdist sitcom masterpiece Lady Dynamite. ...more
2023 reads, #79. I recently took the time to re-read the novel The Paper Chase (my review) by John Jay Osborn, in honor of his recent passing, and end2023 reads, #79. I recently took the time to re-read the novel The Paper Chase (my review) by John Jay Osborn, in honor of his recent passing, and ended up enjoying just as much as when I originally read it back in high school; and that got me thinking yet again about legal thriller author Scott Turow's very first book, which for those who don't know is actually a nonfiction memoir about his first year at Harvard Law School in the early 1970s, the exact same setting and years as The Paper Chase too. So I put that on reserve at the Chicago Public Library as well, and just got done reading that for the first time, and it was interesting too for sure, both because of the ways it mirrored Osborn's novel and the way it differed from it.
Turow isn't trying to affix a three-act plot to his manuscript, like Osborn did with The Paper Chase, so he can just tell the story of being at HLS in a very straightforward and factual way, which both adds to his version of the story and takes away from it; for while you get a lot more detail about the experience in Turow's book, in the way you would expect a piece of long-form magazine journalism to talk about the subject as well, it's also drier and less romantic than Osborn's novel, which when all is said and done is not just about the law school itself but this young, confused, often terrified hero at the heart of the story. (Also, if you're like me, you'll be struck by how many incredibly simple things about the law Turow needs to describe here, such as what depositions are, which makes me realize how much more all of us as a society now know about the law in general, because of the endless legal TV shows and movies and thriller novels that have been released to the public in the 50 years since Turow's book first came out.) Although it's getting the maximum 5 out of 5 stars from me today, it's still not being recommended to every person out there; you need to be in the mood for a fairly dry factual look at what the first year of a law school is like if you're going to get any pleasure out of it at all, which is not the case with The Paper Chase, so judge whether to pick it up or not based on what you think your reaction would be to that. ...more
2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift co2023 reads, #80. Earlier this year I heard from an acquaintance of mine, transgressive author Joshua Mohr, who was writing to nicely send me a gift copy of his newest book, the absurdist fairytale Farsickness that he co-wrote with his small daughter during the pandemic. That made me remember that I had lost touch with Mohr's career ever since my small press closed in the late 2010s, after being so impressed with his first couple of books on the exquisite small publisher Two Dollar Radio; and after scanning through his bibliography, I realized that what I really wanted to read next of his was a memoir he published just recently in 2021 called Model Citizen, concerning his time as a drug and alcohol addict and general lover of chaos back during his youth in the gentrifying '90s Mission district of San Francisco.
I just got done with it this week, and it's as powerful as you would expect from someone who's made an entire career now out of stories about the world's druggies, petty criminals, and other lumpen proletarians; for it turns out that Mohr's real life is very similar to the sometimes desperate lives of his characters, with the hipster scene of the '90s Bay Area being not particularly helpful to this son of an alcoholic who had already started drinking himself by the age of ten, and who by his thirties was now regularly injecting fentanyl and ketamine, and who purposely cultivated chaos-embracing friends who would encourage him to do things like mug drunk guys just for kicks, or have contests over who could shoot more staples into their skin without flinching after getting good and fucked up. This is easily the best part of the book, the unflinching and unsentimental way he approaches his years of darkness, neither condemning the behavior nor Tarantino-glorifying it, but simply acknowledging that this is what his life used to be, and that in some ways it was like this precisely because this is the way the entire Bay Area artistic community was back in those years, a sort of "late-stage Byronism" of doomed romantic artists that Generation X perfected in a way no other generation had, until the next young generation entirely rejected it (like they have with most Generation X things) and now treasure their artistic lives of health, wellness, earnestness and financial security.
Of course, this being Mohr, the book is also incredibly insightful as well, which in good MFA style is centered around a compelling framing device that just naturally makes you want to learn more; namely, after being sober for years, now married and with a toddler child, he discovers that the occasional moments of physical numbness he sometimes experienced while an addict were actually a series of strokes he didn't realize he was having, and that doctors have now determined that he has a hole in his heart (talk about MFA symbolism!) that will require surgery to correct, and that they plan on knocking him out using the exact same fentanyl he used to be addicted to. Will this "freelapse" eventually knock him off the wagon again? Will his love for his infant daughter be enough to keep him on the straight and narrow?
Mohr uses the event as basically an excuse to do a "plain-language Proust" digression-filled look back at his entire life, examine the crippling self-esteem issues from his damaging childhood that led to the breakup of his first marriage and the constant doubts he has about his second, and pontificate in a clever, knowing way about how actual sobriety stories often don't fit the neat, tidy three-act structure that Hollywood wants them to when making inspirational Oscarbait films about the subject. And indeed, although this book made me laugh out loud sometimes, unnervingly see myself at other points (I was part of Chicago's arts community in these same years, which shared a lot of the same dysfunctions as San Francisco's), and just plain ol' openly weep in the middle of public cafes at yet other moments (prompting all the people around me to check out what book exactly I was reading that had moved me to such an extent -- you're welcome, Josh), what I liked and appreciated the most about this book is that Mohr has the courage to make it a messy story, one that doesn't hit the usual three-act beats and that he refuses to force into that pattern, which I bet he was under an immense pressure to do, since this was his first of his then five books to actually come out on a mainstream press (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), after having the usual indie career before this of prestigious but tiny destinations like Two Dollar Radio and Soft Skull. That makes the book much more interesting than usual, which makes it much better than usual, and I was really glad to see Mohr make such a strong commitment to telling the story he knew he needed to tell, even at the expense of the feel-good wrap-up most people are looking for when they read clean-and-sober books like these. As he demonstrates by the end of the book, even the term "clean and sober story" is a misnomer in the first place, one that leads to manipulative memoirs instead of intellectually honest ones, after his freelapse makes him realize with a lot of terror just how close all addicts are all the time to their head sinking below the water's surface yet again; and that makes for a much more interesting and enjoyable read than simply another Lifetime movie told the same exact way for the ten thousandth time again.
Unfortunately, the end kind of falters a bit, which is why it's getting 4 stars instead of 5 from me; it becomes pretty clear in the last third that Mohr simply ran out of things to say, so he starts glomming on more and more to the typical infuriating MFA tricks at that point, especially his habit of writing very artsy run-on sentences when he doesn't have much of a point to make. Or sometimes single paragraphs that last for two or three pages, which like all three-page single paragraphs you can entirely skip over without missing even the tiniest important thing to the story. (Also, Mohr very badly and very often makes both of the general mistakes about storytelling that almost all humans know, whether or not they're writers themselves -- that no one wants to hear about the dream you had last night, and no one besides you is interested in the randomly adorable thing your kid did yesterday, stories of which start taking up more and more and more and more and more of the book's final third.) That said, these problems weren't enough to stop me from loving the book, just like I've loved everything of Mohr's I've now read (think of my 4 stars here at Goodreads as actually more like 4 and a half stars, if I could award half-stars here); and that's made me realize that I have some backlog reading to do now, in that Mohr has actually put out another three books between my early years as a reviewer and now, and I want to read them all. Next up will be his 2011 Damascus, the novel that first started getting him mainstream notice and that began lifting him out of the indie-lit ghetto, so I hope you'll join me here again in early 2024 for that. For now, though, I can confidently state that this will be making my "2023 best reads of the year" report I'll be sharing on the social network Mastodon at the end of December. If you can stand queasy stories, pick it up with no delay. ...more
2023 reads, #33. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of the books at Blinkist that makes me really curious to2023 reads, #33. Digested as a synopsis through the summarizing service Blinkist. This is one of the books at Blinkist that makes me really curious to see what the full 300-page version of it is like; because I gotta say, the 15-minute spoken summary I listened to made it sound like one of the most freaking pointless books that's ever existed, and I'm now really curious to read other Goodreads reviews and see if those who tackled the full book came away with this impression too. Turns out co-authors (and conveniently now co-hosts of a podcast about the subject of this book, alluded to endlessly in this book) Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey used to be two unknown young actresses forever auditioning for sitcoms! Until one day they both book one! And then they meet and become friends! And then the show's a huge success! So now they're famous! FAMOUS FRIENDS! Who do things for each other and hang out with each other, oh, and they're just such good friends with each other, and did you know by the way that the entire cast of The Office was like this, no fights or drama on set, just nine straight years of a big giant GROUP OF SUCH GOOD FRIENDS OF ALL OF ONE ANOTHER!!!!
Sheesh, really? It's specifically books like these that make me feel not even the tiniest fucking goddamned bit guilty about belonging to a summary service like Blinkist (which, after all, is nothing more than the 21st-century smartphone version of Cliff Notes), because there is just so little intriguing unique content here that I would feel actively ripped off if I had spent $30 and three days of my life getting through it. Blinkist wouldn't exist if there weren't so many writers and publishers willing to put out books that can be so easily summarized in 15 minutes in the first place, so that's a snake-eating-its-own-tail dilemma for a traditional publishing industry currently going through its last spasming throes before death, when it finally gets suffocated for good under the weight of 400 million new novels coming out on Amazon next year that were all written by AI chat programs. I mean, maybe I'm wrong, and I'll see in other people's reviews that there was actually a whole bunch of fascinating content in the full book version that got unfairly cut out during the Blinkist synopsis, but I'm willing to bet right now that I'll actually find quite a bit of reviews that agree with my own look at the summary, that this is essentially a cotton-candy-weighing piece of supplemental fluff to support what's an equally cotton-candy-weighing supplemental fluff podcast, one that has the audacity to cash in on retro love for The Office not even ten years since it went off the air, both these projects threatening to fly off into the obscure horizon just the moment a big enough cultural wind comes through and knocks them on their way. In this case, I'm glad to have gotten through it all as quickly as I did....more
2022 reads, #54. So, the latest tell-all celebrity trainwreck memoir is here, this time from Friends star Matthew Perry, who turns out to have spent b2022 reads, #54. So, the latest tell-all celebrity trainwreck memoir is here, this time from Friends star Matthew Perry, who turns out to have spent by his reckoning approximately seven million dollars over the years on rehab facilities and their associated private plane rides to and fro, to feed an uncontrollable liquor and opioid addiction that by all rights should've killed him several years ago (or at least according to the horrific tale that begins the book, in which his colon literally explodes, he goes into a coma for three days, and his family is told that he has an only 2% chance of surviving). The good news here is that it's clear Perry wrote this himself, versus the usual celebrity route of handing off a box of dictaphone tapes to some anonymous ghostwriter schmuck in Echo Park; but unfortunately the way you can tell this is that Perry's prose is at the level of a horny 14-year-old boy at Reddit, all questionable slang, toilet humor, and bravado over how many famous women he's slept with. (Another clue? Perry clearly meant to title this book Unaccompanied Minor, because of at least a dozen scenes that either symbolically or literally use the term [plus his admission in the introduction that "I was originally going to call this book Unaccompanied Minor"], but that the marketing team at Flatiron Press came to him afterwards and said, "Look, babe, the book needs to have 'Friends' in the title or we're simply not going to publish it," leading to a conceptually schizophrenic mess that could've only happened by Perry being the actual author, instead of some corporate-approved ghostwriter who was taking his cues directly from the publisher.)
As such, the book lacks profoundly as a simple literary read, but let's all admit that this isn't the reason people are reading it in the first place, but rather as the latest attempt to gawk at the rich and famous freaks out there in Los Angeles. And indeed, this memoir is literally a textbook confirmation of everything you've ever suspected about Hollywood -- that the only people with the chutzpah to devote their lives to the miniscule chance of becoming famous are those with crippling narcissism combined with non-existent self-esteem, exacerbated early in life by overcontrolling parents in a troubled marriage who pushed that child too hard too fast in order to compensate for their own ego issues. (It's no surprise that Perry turns out to have been a tennis prodigy while a child too, and that he actually tried out for Nick Bollettieri's infamous tennis child-pro factory in Florida before discovering that he didn't have the Agassi-type talent to make it nationally.) Such people greedily gobble their way through any intimacy and care the rest of the world may show them, casually tossing such people aside the moment their sympathy and help have been used up like a dirty Kleenex; and I have to admit, after watching him in this book do such a thing to literally a dozen ex-friends and ex-lovers, dismissing all his unconscionable behavior with a single wave of his hand while muttering, "I'm sick, what can I do," I found it impossible after reading this memoir to reach any other conclusion than that Perry is a human monster, and that his unsolvable addiction issues are some kind of divine retribution for all the damage he caused the human race on his rush to the bottom he's currently now at, where the only traction he can still get in the entertainment industry is by publishing one of these tawdry trainwreck tell-alls in the first place. (He essentially admits in the book that he's permanently persona non grata at the studios anymore, and that his attempts to shift his career into screenwriting in recent years has resulted in nothing but failure; and the cynical side of me suspects that part of the impetus behind writing this memoir at the moment he has, when he clearly is still not in control of his addiction, is so he can shift public perception so that people think of him as a writer now, to make his new attempt at screenwriting get a little more traction among the forever image-obsessed executives of the entertainment industry.)
Unfortunately this isn't one of those fun garbage-human trainwreck celebrity memoirs, but one of the depressing ones, a tale that makes it clear that Perry has lived a life of emotional misery almost since being born, and that not even decades of twice-weekly therapy and dozens of rehab detoxes have put even the slightest mental dent in his uncontrollable urge to shovel oxycodone and vodka into his mouth as fast as as his numb, bloated hands will let him. It did, however, make me feel much better about my own life, which I suppose is the whole point of these garbage-people bottoming-out memoirs to begin with. If you're to read it at all, it should be with this "let's gawk at the rich and famous freaks" attitude mentioned before.
P.S. Was reminded after reading other people's reviews of one of the most egregiously narcissistic things about this book, which is his literal dozen insistences throughout the manuscript that his unique line delivery style on Friends ("Could I BE any more of a hack?") forever and permanently changed the entire American vernacular of how we as a collective nation speak conversational English, which he doesn't mean as a joke or an exaggeration at all (or as one reviewer here put it, "He seems to genuinely believe that he singlehandedly invented sarcasm"), which is about as good an example as possible of the cartoonishly inflated ego combined with deep self-hatred that fuels this entire manuscript. And yeah, as long as we're on the subject, what's up with his habit of throwing in a random half-hearted reference to Christianity once every 30 pages or so like clockwork, as if that Flatiron marketing team from before said during the editing process, "Oh yes, and we're also trying to target the Trump Conservative Christian crowd in all our newest books, so if you could make semi-regular references to how Jesus is your best buddy or some other nonsense like that, that'd be great, Mr. Perry."...more
2022 read, #19. DID NOT FINISH. I bet there's a big and enthusiastic audience out there for Easy Crafts for the Insane, the latest memoir by Kelly Wil2022 read, #19. DID NOT FINISH. I bet there's a big and enthusiastic audience out there for Easy Crafts for the Insane, the latest memoir by Kelly Williams Brown, who (I just found out today) was the sole creator of the now famous cultural term "adulting" (due to her first memoir), but who then after the book's success immediately went through a two-year emotional downward spiral into the depths of depression, aided mightily by a series of physical accidents, a divorce, and several deaths in her family. But Jesus Christ, her personal writing style is just so oppressively twee and whimsical that I couldn't even make it through 10 pages of her nonsense before I found myself literally screaming out loud (and I'm not making this up), "NO! NO!!! I'M NOT GOING TO PUT UP WITH THIS FOR 250 MORE PAGES!" So, you know, I didn't. Buyer beware. ...more
2022 reads, #13. My therapist recommended that I read this classic on trauma and the ways the body physically responds to it, after recently going thr2022 reads, #13. My therapist recommended that I read this classic on trauma and the ways the body physically responds to it, after recently going through my sixth anxiety attack of the pandemic and really starting to feel the effects of them all. It was...okay, but a lot of the stuff about the various brain parts and how they respond to trauma was stuff I already knew, and the stuff I didn't know was just written out in such a long, detailed, purposely obtuse way, which kind of put me off of it. In fact, I just had a hard time in general really getting into this, and it really felt like the pages were just plodding along at a snail's pace, although I'm having a hard time articulating why, because the information itself is just fine, informative and interesting while diving both backwards into history and forwards to the future. Maybe it's because I'm dealing with a low-level chronic trauma that still continues to this day (the "lingering" or "lethargy" or "acedia" or however you want to put the emotional stresses that have come with the pandemic), while nearly all of this book is devoted to helping people who have already been through a much bigger trauma and are now over it (war, rape, car accident, etc.), and are trying to learn how to get back to acting normally within a normal world. Unfortunately for me, the world isn't normal yet, so a lot of this advice about getting myself back to normal didn't really seem to apply, so perhaps that's why I had such a hard time emotionally connecting to the work, because I was hoping it'd be of practical help but wasn't much in my particular case. Oh well! It was interesting nonetheless, and I recommend it to others who perhaps are not coming to it from the same place I currently am....more
2022 reads, #12. I actually read this fascinating book after first hearing about it from a freelance client, the childhood and early-adult memoirs of 2022 reads, #12. I actually read this fascinating book after first hearing about it from a freelance client, the childhood and early-adult memoirs of a person widely considered one of the premier card sharks and sleight-of-hand magicians in the country, and what happened in his strange, unique life to obsessively push him towards becoming that person. The most interesting part here is watching DelGaudio's moral journey to get to the place he now is as an adult -- where he loves the deception and the secrets that come with things like palming cards and stacking decks, but hates the idea of swindling people from it because they weren't aware the deception was taking place. That's something to be warned about before going into this, that DelGaudio didn't lead the long life of high crime you might imagine for someone in his position, and in fact the one and only illegal activity he ever participated in was a strictly six-month temporary fill-in for a friend that mostly just serves here as the literary button for DelGaudio to go back and examine his childhood.
There we see a kid from a broken home, with a closeted lesbian mom, who did neither good in school nor particularly liked it, who was forced to live many major lies while growing up and understood the practical benefits of doing so, but who found himself magnetically attracted to the world of magic and sleight-of-hand, finding one of the last of the old-school magic shops by coincidence four blocks from where he lived in the tourist town of Colorado Springs, and making it his second home all through his teenaged years and beyond. (For what it's worth, DelGaudio is now an accomplished performance artist who sort of fits in the strange intersection between Ricky Jay and Marina Abramovic, and was the official artist-in-residence at Disney Imagineering throughout the 2010s, as they were developing the Star Wars theme park and accompanying LARP hotel for Walt Disney World.) Written in a plain, engaging style, this is a deep character study through and through, so don't pick this up expecting thrilling tales from crooked casinos and having guns pulled on you by wised-up mafiosos; instead expect an astute and insightful tale about families biological and intentional, and the informal network that still holds together the web of America's roving con artists. It comes strongly recommended in that spirit. ...more
2022 reads, #11. There's a longer story here, but basically one of my friends has recently decided in her fifties to finally pursue a lifelong goal, t2022 reads, #11. There's a longer story here, but basically one of my friends has recently decided in her fifties to finally pursue a lifelong goal, to not only become a successful children's author but a highly influential and groundbreaking one, in the spirit of Judy Blume or John Green; so that has her reading classics from the genre these days that first missed her attention as an actual child, which in turn has me occasionally reading children's classics that first missed my own attention as an actual child. This is one of them, first published in 1951, eventual winner of the Charles W. Follett Award and the first-ever National Jewish Book Award for children's literature; it can be rightly called "Little House on the Prairie but for an urban Jewish family," in that it's based on the true childhood of the author (who was in late middle-age when she wrote it), who grew up in a Yiddish immigrant family who lived in Manhattan's Lower East Side in the 1910s, in the height of its days as a tenement-filled magnet for fresh Eastern European immigrants, especially Yiddish Jews from Tsarist Russia's "Pale of Settlement" (i.e. the countries that have always borne the brunt of the damage from Russia's collisions with the West -- Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, etc.).
To be clear, it's very well-done, a charming and captivating look back at these crowded, noisy, smelly streets from the nostalgic filter of an eight-year-old girl who saw it all with magic and wonder; but as I pointed out to my friend in our mini-book club of it afterwards, it's not a coincidence at all that this found a publisher just three years after the publication of Anne Frank's diary, and I remarked how if it this had come out twenty years previous or twenty years in the future, it wouldn't have gotten nearly the kind of traction from society that it did by coming out directly after the Holocaust, when the Western arts was looking for as many heartwarming stories about Judaism they could find. Also, be aware that this is written from a pre-Beverly Cleary point of influence, i.e. all the kids are angelic little docile sweethearts and the forever wise parents are always patient and understanding, one of the last big hurrahs of the "Don't Speak Unless Ye Have Been Spoken To" school of children's literature before Mid-Century Modernism and then Postmodernism put an end to it for good. Still, the pure joy the girls get out of things like the giant beards and bellies of all the shopkeepers along their street, or eating a plain baked sweet potato for a penny because it's literally the one thing they'll have all week with any kind of sugar in it whatsoever, is worth the time alone it takes to read this slim little volume, not to mention the entire chapter devoted to all the sisters getting scarlet fever (!), which is to say nothing of the ridiculously Dickensian coincidence to end the entire thing. It comes strongly recommended in this spirit, a chance to see a forgotten classic written in a Mid-Century Modernist style but about subjects you've never seen Mid-Century Modernism take on before, an eye-opening experience still very much worth the time of your own current tween kids. ...more
2021 reads, #103. A recent rewatch of Prometheus had me looking up the Wikipedia page for the alien race featured in all the Alien movies; and while i2021 reads, #103. A recent rewatch of Prometheus had me looking up the Wikipedia page for the alien race featured in all the Alien movies; and while it was a surprise at first to find that the page was the length and depth of the biography of some major figure in world history, upon reflection I realized that that shouldn't really be a surprise at all, after having the race featured in one slightly different form or another through a dozen feature films and hundreds of comic book issues. That got me thinking again about Swiss artist H.R. Giger, whose legitimately unsettling yet simultaneously metal-album-cover cheesy "biomecha" paintings in the 1970s (some of the first in the fine-art world to be painted with airbrushes, along with more entrenched gallery people like Ed Paschke) provided the first inspiration for the aliens in this franchise, and who was eventually hired by director Ridley Scott to come to London to design and build many of the first film's most iconic setpieces, for which he won an Oscar and forever changed the world of dark sci-fi (not to mention metal album covers).
On an impulse, I checked out the two books on him the Chicago Public Library has, 1977's Necronomicon -- Giger's debut publication, the book that made it into Salvador Dali's hands by way of a mutual friend, who gave it to Alejandro Jodorowsky, who hired Giger to work on concept paintings for his ultimately doomed production of Dune, which is how he came to the attention of fellow staffer Dan O'Brannon, who soon afterward successfully pitched his Alien spec script to 20th Century Fox, which is how it is that Giger did all the alien design for that movie -- and then a book made out of Giger's concept art from Alien itself, first published in 1979 right after the movie came out. Or, at least I thought this was just going to be a book of concept paintings; but it instead turned out to be a much more interesting thing, which is those paintings combined with an extremely candid journal Giger kept at the time about the entire experience, and the copious still photos he took on the sets and inside the effects workshops where he and his buddies worked.
It's fascinating, I have to admit, which is why I thought it was worth writing about here at Goodreads, even though I won't be doing any such write-up for the more traditional exhibit-catalogue-style Necronomicon; fully of snotty opinionated rants from the uncompromising Giger about all the details of the production that drove him crazy, it has the same "fuck these California normies" vibe as Charles Bukowski has in Hollywood, his memoir of adapting his story Barfly into a movie starring Mickey Rourke as a fictionalized version of Bukowski himself. That's being kind of unfair, though; Giger in fact has all kinds of complimentary things to say about the various hardworking production designers and special-effects bottom-rung employees that brought his nightmarish airbrushed visions to full three-dimensional life, plus he pretty rightly gives a lot of credit to Scott himself for having the singular vision of the film he did, and being Giger's quiet champion at various points when it seemed no one else would. It's this unfiltered look at how the sausage is made (literally in this case), combined with the nerd-amazing production photos, combined with the flabbergasting paintings Giger originally made, that makes this such a spectacular book, and comes recommended to an audience way beyond the fanboys who just like gawking at his robot-squid vagina-penis monstrosities....more
2021 reads, #6. It was just a couple of months before the writing of this review that the world saw the cancer-caused death of troubled child actor Du2021 reads, #6. It was just a couple of months before the writing of this review that the world saw the cancer-caused death of troubled child actor Dustin Diamond, a sad end to a legitimately tragic life and yet one more cautionary tale about the dangers of letting children get involved in the inherently icky world of international celebrity. In the very last interview Diamond did before he died, one of the things he confessed was that he didn't write a single word of his 2009 autobiography Behind the Bell, but rather was forced by his publisher (the now out-of-business Canadian trash peddlers Transit Publishing) to sit down with a ghostwriter for a few days relating anecdotes, and then said ghostwriter went off and just made up a bunch of stuff that never happened and Transit published it without checking any of it with Diamond first. Between his death and that confession, that was just exactly enough to inspire me to check the memoir out of my local library this week, where I found a book so reprehensible as to make one wonder how it can even exist without the people being mentioned in it suing it out of existence.
To be clear, I'm too old to be nostalgic about Saved by the Bell, the children's show that first made Diamond famous -- I was already 19 when it debuted in 1988, and well into my twenties and living my adult life during the '90s when it reached its popular peak -- and so that made my reading of it problematic, because I've never actually watched a single episode of the show (nor its spinoffs, SBTB: The College Years and SBTB: The New Class), so largely didn't get the references to the show's setting, events and cast that largely make up the contents of this book. Then again, you don't really need to know anything about the show to know that Diamond calling his co-star Tiffani-Amber Thiessen a whore literally on page 3 is the very definition of déclassé, and bodes bad tidings for how the rest of the book is to play out.
And indeed, this book is mostly defined by the sheer amount of piss and vinegar Diamond sprays over virtually everyone he's ever met -- Fred Savage is a "douchenozzle;" Neil Patrick Harris an "asshole" (and Ed Alonzo a closeted homosexual who was regularly having secret sex with Harris); Gary Coleman "jaded" and "stuck up;" Jeremy Jackson a "fucking mess;" Corey Haim and Corey Feldman insufferable pricks who considered themselves "God's twin gifts to the Earth;" Mark-Paul Gosselaar a spoiled, preening "Golden Child" who once pissed in the Playboy Mansion grotto; Mario Lopez a "man-whore" and "poon hound" with "saggy old man boobs;" Elizabeth Berkley a "desperate party hound;" Dennis Haskins a "career predator;" not to mention claiming that comedian Martin Lawrence once raped SBTB star Lark Voorhies without having a shred of evidence; and that the aforementioned Thiessen regularly smoked pot on set and had sex with both Gosselaar and Lopez in their dressing rooms immediately after each other. (And mind you, this is while also admitting that Thiessen's parents once selflessly let him and his pets move into their house for months to avoid a stalker.)
And it's not just outrageously negative statements that makes this book so unpleasant: at certain points in the page count, Diamond claims he has an enormous penis (or "meat stick" in his unfortunate particular vernacular) that Berkley was in awe of; has had sex with over 2,000 partners (all of whom he collectively apologizes to at once in the appendix, in an open letter that begins "To all the chicks I banged before"), many of the incidents taking place on the actual SBTB sets and sometimes in his co-stars' dressing rooms; has seen every cast member of SBTB naked at one point or another; used to "bang" 14-year-old girls regularly during live tours (and would also buy an annual pass each year to Disneyland because it was insanely easy to get teenage girls away from their parents there and spend a half-hour fingering them in a dark back corner of the amusement park); had a full-on romantic relationship with 20-years-senior NBC vice president Linda Mancuso when he was a teenager and she was in her thirties (which she can neither confirm nor deny because of conveniently dying six years before this book was written); once received a psychic message the day before he was to meet him that Michael Jackson was a pedophile; regularly improvised lines that made the SBTB writing staff feel threatened because they were so much better than the provided script; was once given a kilo of cocaine by a Cuban drug dealer because SBTB was his daughter's favorite show; received more fan mail than any other SBTB cast member; deliberately delivered terrible performances during SBTB: The New Class in an attempt to ease into adult roles after the show was over (under the justification that if his acting was deliberately over-the-top enough, producers would surely see that he was in on the joke and was actually a talented, serious actor); was the actual person who got the big-screen Hollywood version of Scooby-Doo greenlit, just to get conspiratorially screwed out of the Shaggy role due to secret machinations by Sarah Michelle Gellar and Freddie Prinze Jr.; and was regularly propositioned by most of the show's teenage extras (and would pick out random audience members to have sex with during taping days, in the style of KISS members instructing their roadies to bring girls backstage after shows, for which he refers to himself as a "Super Pimp").
To be clear, Diamond is ultimately the person responsible for Diamond's adult life becoming such a mess -- no one forced him to publish this terrible book, just like no one forced him to star in an amateur adult video, or then try to monetize said video a year later, or appear in such reality shows as Hulk Hogan's Celebrity Championship Wrestling and World's Dumbest..., or be a between-act host at the annual Insane Clown Posse convention "Gathering of the Juggalos," or start a nu-metal band called Salty the Pocketknife, or stab a guy one night inside a Wisconsin dive bar, or any of the other outrageous shenanigans that marked his post-SBTB life. But then again, it's not exactly Diamond's fault that his entire childhood was essentially stolen from him by greedy and amoral adults (including a father who spent nearly every penny Diamond made before he could turn eighteen and legally claim it), leaving him untrained and entirely unprepared for adulthood once he finished puberty and was no longer the cute little kid who owed his entire career to being a cute little kid.
He deserved better than that, and he certainly deserved better than this shoddily produced memoir by this fly-by-night company, which on top of all its other sins is filled with literally hundreds of typos and other grammatical mistakes. (At a certain point, the manuscript spells the Charles Dickens character Bob Cratchit as "Bob Crach It," and on three separate occasions it refers to craft services as "Kraft Service," as if all food given out on Hollywood sets is actually prepared by the Kraft corporation.) What was merely a horrible book while Diamond was alive becomes a crime against humanity now that he's dead; and no matter what kind of a human monster he was (and he was demonstrably a pretty horrible monster, make no mistake), nobody deserves the kind of hatchet job this exploitation piece does on both him and everyone he ever knew. It comes with a strong hate-read recommendation in this spirit....more
When I was growing up in the 1970s, seemingly every adult I knew had at least a couple of James A. Michener's humongous historical-fiction tomes in their bookshelves, and it always made me curious to take some of them on once I got old enough and became a good enough reader to do so; but now that I have gotten old enough, Michener has profoundly fallen out of favor, and in the 2020s I doubt you'll find even one young person out of ten who has even heard of him. That's a shame, I discovered after finally reading my very first book of his, which happens to be the very first book he wrote, 1947's Tales of the South Pacific; because despite the daunting reputation of his books' page counts, this turned out to be one of the more pleasantly readable books I've taken on in the last year, a much more poetic and emotionally moving manuscript than I was expecting from Michener's reputation as "King of the Overlong Exposition."
Michener's one and only Pulitzer win of the over 50 books he published, and the source material for the Broadway musical of the same name, this is even more surprising when you realize that he was a simple high-school teacher with no publishing credits in the years leading up to World War Two, and that he only wrote this book in a personal attempt to capture all the crazy stories he witnessed as a Navy journalist during the war (a position he volunteered for because of otherwise being a pacifist Quaker, and a position only given to him because his commanding officers mistakenly thought he was the son of Admiral Marc Mitscher, and therefore needed to be handled with kid gloves). But once you read it, you immediately understand why the wartime Pulitzer committee would consider this irresistible catnip; because much like John Hersey's fellow Pulitzer-winning A Bell for Adano two years previously, Michener's main point here is to show how the benefits of a capitalist democracy like the US provided the exact entrepreneurial skills and "can-do attitude" that allowed the US to be the decisive factor in the Allies winning the war in the first place, a sort of paean to the kinds of quick thinking, solutions on the fly, and dogged persistence that allowed the American military to finally overcome a vastly superior Japanese force, one that already knew the tiny hidden islands of the Pacific Ocean with a kind of intimacy and mastery that the US still hasn't acquired even 80 years later.
But what sets this apart from previous wartime books -- and what truly made it so beloved when it first came out -- is that Michener digs down to find the beating heartbeat of humanity that lurks within these stories of battleship maneuvers and bombing raids, excelling at showing just how much downtime there is between battles in war, and the various good, bad, serious and silly ways the soldiers involved deal with these anxious downtimes. And in this, Michener is surprisingly critical of the very soldiers he means to champion, not shying away at all from the acknowledgement that alcoholism was rampant among the US military during the war, that there were many soldiers who used fascism as a convenient excuse to line their own pockets, and that American nurses had to be stationed literally on islands by themselves with no male soldiers in sight, for fear of otherwise being the perpetual victims of sexual assault the entire time they were there. It's the back-and-forth between this idealistic heroism and the sometimes ugly realities of human nature that provides the frisson that makes this book so readable, and it pretty much draws a line in the sand that demarks the way that all military stories were told before it, and the way all such stories were permanently changed after it.
Nonetheless, I'm giving it 4 stars instead of 5, mostly as a way of acknowledging that younger readers and especially readers of color will find every single problematic element that's almost always found in books this old; for despite Michener's relatively progressive stance here that "rape is bad," he still loads this manuscript up with so many awkward cultural statements about race and gender as to give heart palpitations to any good Woke. I personally wasn't that particularly bothered by it; but with every passing year, I feel more and more compelled to follow up such statements with an acknowledgement that I'm a 51-year-old straight white male, so of course I wasn't that particularly bothered by it, but that others with different backgrounds than mine will find this a much more troubling book than I did. (And of course, the less said about the musical adaptation's "There's Nothin' Like a Dame," in which Rodgers and Hammerstein make a lighthearted joke about these soldiers' predelection for serially raping any woman who comes within grabbing distance of them [actual lyrics: "We feel as hungry as the wolf felt when he met Red Riding Hood"], the better.)
So all in all, like most books of this type, caution and an open mind is required when approaching Tales of the South Pacific here 74 years after its initial publication; but if you're able to do so, you'll find a surprisingly enjoyable, surprisingly sophisticated record of both the highs and lows of the so-called "Greatest Generation," and I have to admit that this did nothing but even further solidify my interest in reading yet more by Michener. (For those who don't know, by the '70s Michener had become much more famous for outputting enormous 1,500-page novels every few years about such specific subjects as the history of Poland, the founding of Judaism, and the establishment of America's space program, gaining accolades worldwide for his meticulous research and even-handed overviews; so there's a big part of me that feels like I haven't "truly experienced" Michener until I take on at least one of these.) That probably won't be coming until another year from now, though, so I hope you'll join me again in late autumn 2021 for that! ...more
I was raised in the 1970s by two enthusiastic tennis-playing parents, which means that my era of closely following along with the sport was the era ofI was raised in the 1970s by two enthusiastic tennis-playing parents, which means that my era of closely following along with the sport was the era of Borg, McEnroe and Connors, and that someone like Andre Agassi barely registered as more than a snotty upstart by the time I headed to college in the late '80s and stopped tracking professional tennis for good. So it came as a surprise, then, to learn from a recent freelance client that, at a certain point in the late 1990s, Agassi slipped in the rankings from #1 to 141 in an unprecedented two years, and that he responded to the challenge by literally downshifting into the tennis minor leagues and working his way back up, in grimy, sparsely attended tournaments on Midwestern college campuses for almost no money and certainly no prestige.
This made me interested in Agassi as an actual person for the first time, so I decided to check out his 2009 autobiography, Open, co-written with Pulitzer winner JR Moehringer. It was pretty much what I was expecting -- physically bullied by an overly demanding Middle Eastern father since literally birth to become a tennis champion (as were all his siblings as well), Agassi quickly developed an intense hatred for the sport that led to most of the "bad boy" behavior he became known for in his twenties (dating celebrities, driving sports cars, refusing to wear white at Wimbledon), grinding it out on the ATP Tour year after year for reasons he can't even articulate clearly himself, a sort of combination of Freudian family issues and intense self-competition that drove him to stay in the game for decades despite never truly enjoying it even once. It'd be nice to say that the story came as a surprise, but unfortunately we've seen this situation over and over, whenever it comes to a child pushed unwillingly by a domineering parent into an activity they feel ambivalent at best about. Certainly the one person who comes off as golden here is Agassi's ex-wife, the fellow child star Brooke Shields, who is clearly presented as a wounded celebrity victim herself, in search of a kind of adult peace that she was simply unable to find with the Corvette-driving, Budweiser-poster-hanging man-child Agassi. (Agassi is now married to his fellow tennis champion Steffi Graf, and it says a lot about her notoriously private nature that she is barely mentioned here other than in the most generic "I love her so much" kind of terms.)
It was nothing earth-shattering, although sports memoirs rarely are; but the real-life drama behind Agassi's career makes up for the pedestrian story, helped immensely by recruiting someone of Pulitzer quality to be his ghostwriter. It comes recommended in this spirit, which if nothing else has convinced me next year after the pandemic is over to attend a couple of these ATP minor league tournaments myself. (In Chicago, there are two major ones every year just a short train ride from my apartment, one in the tony suburb of Winnetka and the other in the downstate collegetown of Champaign.) Your results may vary, but it's at least worth picking up, no matter what your particular personal relationship is to tennis. ...more
Like most of the sailing memoirs I've read over the years, Douglas Fricke's Catamaran Crossing is a slight yet pleasant enough tale, in which we watchLike most of the sailing memoirs I've read over the years, Douglas Fricke's Catamaran Crossing is a slight yet pleasant enough tale, in which we watch our protagonist and his friends slowly travel from the coast of Spain over to the Caribbean islands, having the kinds of minimalist adventures that you would expect one to have under those circumstances. It's a languid story, told with competent but pedestrian prose, with highs and lows that aren't so much peaks as they are gentle rolling waves, sort of the literary equivalent of getting quietly drunk on a Key West beach while listening to a Jimmy Buffett album. I'm assuming that this was Fricke's whole point, so in this the book is quite successful, although your own results may vary depending on how much you too like drinking pina coladas and getting caught in the rain. ...more
2020 reads, #12. I mostly know J. Michael Straczynski (or JMS as his fans call him) because of his TV show Babylon 5, a 1990s sci-fi series that foret2020 reads, #12. I mostly know J. Michael Straczynski (or JMS as his fans call him) because of his TV show Babylon 5, a 1990s sci-fi series that foretold the rise of complex characterization and serial storytelling in the "Peak TV" era a decade later; but he's equally as famous for his record-breaking stints in the comic-book industry, his screenplay for Clint Eastwood's Oscar-nominated Changeling, and for co-showrunning the Netflix series Sense8 along with the Wachowskis. In any of these cases, though, I don't think anyone would've suspected that JMS's childhood was the stuff of nightmares, complete with sex-molesting grandmother, a mother who tried to murder him as a baby, and a violent, alcoholic, deeply racist father who still proudly displayed the mini-Gestapo uniform that was lovingly made for him by the Nazis he happily bummed around with as a child himself in World War Two eastern Europe.
That JMS overcame this and became a normally functioning adult at all is a miracle worthy of celebrating, especially when the very first move he made as a newly independent adult was to fall straight into the arms of a religious cult; but the way he built himself up into an award-winning, cultishly loved millionaire sci-fi author along the way makes his life the stuff of legend, especially when reading this candid autobiography and realizing that he did it the longest and hardest way possible, literally starting by grinding out one-acts for no pay and turning in a dozen articles a week for his local college newspaper, accepting such ignoble assignments as punch-up for '80s children's cartoons like He-Man and The Real Ghostbusters, eventually becoming a freelance entertainment journalist for the LA Times and host of a SoCal radio talk show about sci-fi, continuing to write 80 hours a week like clockwork no matter how little or much that work was actually getting purchased and published. It's a mesmerizing, inspiring story, and the only reason it's not getting 5 stars from me is because it also backs up his critics' main complaint, that his writing is the very definition of pedestrian and lacking style. This is a great story, but it would've been mindblowing if told in a witty and sophisticated way; this is more like hearing an accountant tell it in the most plodding way possible during a dinner party filled with other accountants, which still makes it great but lacks a certain final oomph. It still comes recommended to a general audience, though, a story so crazy and unbelievable that you can't help but get sucked into it, no matter what your opinion is of our narrator or even whether or not you've heard of him before.
In which a law-school bro, who thinks he's less douchy than all the other law-school bros because he goes whitewater rafting every summer, dude, gets In which a law-school bro, who thinks he's less douchy than all the other law-school bros because he goes whitewater rafting every summer, dude, gets a study-abroad opportunity in Amsterdam and decides while he's there that he's going to write a journalistic expose about the prostitutes of the red-light district, not by doing anything sensible like taking out an ad looking for interview subjects or working with an existing advocacy group, but by walking around at midnights directly soliciting the women in their windows while they're in the middle of trying to work; then immediately "falls in love" with the very first prostitute who will give him the time of day, doing such creepy things as buying her jewelry to commemorate their first afternoon coffee, and non-consensually holding her hand on the sidewalk whenever they walk from one interview location to another, eventually insisting that they have a "special connection" when after three months of constant harassment he finally wears her down enough to agree to an afternoon interview in her apartment, then promptly throws the manuscript into a locked drawer for twenty years afterwards so that it won't create any problems for him in his new job as (of fucking course) an entertainment lawyer in Los Angeles.
To be fair, David Wienir's book is actually better than what I just described, which at least has the virtue of being a clear-eyed historical document about the state of Amsterdam's red-light district in the late 1990s, a pre-EU, pre-9/11 age when everything was still cheap, Americans were still beloved by locals, and far-right conservatives hadn't yet taken over the Dutch national consciousness. I wanted to start my review the way I did, though, because if you find any of the above statements to be repulsive, there isn't a single chance you're going to like this often infuriating book, a culturally tone-deaf memoir that's a virtual blueprint for everything the #MeToo movement is complaining about these days. Wienir stumbles his way through the red-light district, committing gaffes left and right and then rightly assuming that his winning aw-shucks smile and his ownership of a penis will get him out of any trouble his frat-bro antics might get him into; then when his three-month slumming field trip is over, he goes straight back into the married suburban upper-middle-class no-repercussions life he knew all along was waiting for him, making a series of empty promises to all his new international vagabond friends and then promptly abandoning them the moment this intimacy parasite got what he was looking for from them. Those like me with an interest in learning how the mechanics of Amsterdam's red-light district actually work will find sections in this book that will scratch that itch; but all others are wise to stay far away from this virtual paean to oblivious white-dude entitlement....more
Just once in my life, I would love to read a memoir about a person who engaged in interesting and unusual sexual activities, and have them gleefully aJust once in my life, I would love to read a memoir about a person who engaged in interesting and unusual sexual activities, and have them gleefully admit that the sex was great, that they had a ton of fun, and that they don't regret a single thing. But unfortunately, as I discovered when writing a book on the subject myself about twenty years ago, although there are thousands of Americans on any given day who are happily engaging in orgies or sex with strangers with wide-open eyes and a guilt-free conscience, none of these people will ever get a publishing contract; because in this Puritan-created nation of ours, for the millions of people who don't engage in these activities, the only way they can stomach their tales of prurient sexuality is if the narrator either gets punished at the end of it all, or is miserable and guilty while it's going on.
And thus do we now have America's two millionth memoir about someone who hated having kinky sex, Erica Garza's Getting Off, in which this Los Angeles web journalist spends years having the kind of insane sexual experiences you will only be able to dream about, and complains the whole time about how sick and awful she felt about it all, and how glad she is that she's no longer doing so. The trouble starts right in chapter one, in which Garza admits that ever since puberty, she's intricately associated the concept of sexual pleasure with the concept of overwhelming shame, mostly because of being raised by conservative Mexican parents who would force her to cover her eyes during kissing scenes in movies, and whose entirety of sexual education to her as a teen consisted of a stern warning to never ever let anyone ever touch her "dirty parts." No wonder, then, that by the time Garza was in her twenties, and engaging in the kinds of bad relationships and one-night-stands that most people in their twenties experience, it triggered an all-consuming shame spiral that led her into a tail-eating snake of evermore risky behavior and evermore guilt, each feeding off the other until finally getting saved by the cult-like New Agey woo-woo of the '60s EST cousin known as the Hoffman Process. (Also, of course this book ends with Garza married and preparing to have a baby, because how could any self-respecting American memoir about interesting sex not end with the narrator married and preparing to have a baby? YAY PURITANS!!!)
I admit, I feel a bit guilty myself today for giving this book only three stars, because it's not like Garza is a particularly bad writer; but Christ, this is such an exact cookie-cutter version of every other American sex addiction memoir that it might as well not even exist, the lack of two stars less for anything bad and more for Garza not bringing a single new, unique or interesting thing to the table. (Also, I must pettily confess that the three stars is partly to punish publisher Simon & Schuster, for once again engaging in the most lazy and uninspired acquisition policy in human history. Jesus, no wonder your industry is almost dead.) If you're like most people and can't enjoy a naughty story without someone getting punished for the sin of enjoying themselves, by all means pick this up; but if you're someone who actually likes interesting sexual activities and was hoping for a joyful, wise look at the subject, I'm afraid you're going to have to keep on looking....more
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