Recommendations based on "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love / Beginners"

A riotous collection of memoirs which explores the absurd hilarity of modern life and creates a wickedly incisive portrait of an all-too-familiar world. It takes Sedaris from his humiliating bout with obsessive behaviour in 'A Plague of Tics' to the title story, where he is finally forced to face his naked self in the company of lunatics. At this soulful and moving moment, he brushes cigarette ashes from his pubic hair and wonders what it all means.This remarkable journey into his own life follows a path of self-effacement and a lifelong search for identity leaving himself both under suspicion and over dressed.

David Sedaris returns with his most deeply personal and darkly hilarious book.If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong.When he buys a beach house on the Carolina coast, Sedaris envisions long, relaxing vacations spent playing board games and lounging in the sun with those he loves most. And life at the Sea Section, as he names the vacation home, is exactly as idyllic as he imagined, except for one tiny, vexing realization: it's impossible to take a vacation from yourself.With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny--it's a book that can make you laugh 'til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris's powers of observation have never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you realize that the story of your life is made up of more past than future.This is beach reading for people who detest beaches, required reading for those who loathe small talk and love a good tumor joke. Calypso is simultaneously Sedaris's darkest and warmest book yet--and it just might be his very best.

What We Talk about When We Talk about Love (Vintage Classices)

Beginners

***The Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!*** A smart, funny, and refreshing memoir from Mark Hoppus, the vocalist, bassist, and founding member of pop-punk band blink-182. This is the story of an angst-filled kid from the desert, navigating the chaos of his parents' bitter divorce and searching for his place in the world. Each move across the country was a chance to reinvent himself, switching identities from dork to goth to skate punk, and eventually meeting his best friend who just so happens to be his musical soulmate. With sharp humor and raw honesty, Fahrenheit-182 takes readers through Mark's formative years as a latchkey kid in the 1980s, hooked on punk rock, skateboards, and MTV. Along the way, Mark reflects on his lifelong battle with anxiety, his celebrated career with blink-182, and his public fight with cancer, in a voice that’s both relatable and unmistakably his own. Threaded with sharp humor and heartfelt grit, Fahrenheit-182 is more than just a memoir for blink-182 fans. It’s a funny, smart, and deeply human story for anyone who’s struggled, reinvented themselves, wanted to quit but kept going.

The National Book Award winning memoir with a new foreword by Kathryn Harrison, author of The Kiss.“Fiercely committed to bequeathing a map of his psychic terrain, to spare others the pain of his solitary journey, [Monette’s] fine memoir is affirmative and ultimately celebratory.” — New York Times Book ReviewA child of the 1950s from a small New England town, “perfect Paul” earns straight A’s and scholarships and shines in social and literary pursuits, all the while keeping a secret—from himself and the rest of the world. Struggling to be or at least to imitate a straight man, through Ivy League halls of privilege and bohemian travels abroad, loveless intimacy, and unrequited passion, Paul Monette was haunted, and finally saved, by a dream—“The thing I’d never even seen: two men in love and laughing.” This searingly honest, witty, and humane merging of memoir and manifesto has become the definitive coming out story—and a classic of the coming-of-age genre. It was awarded the 1992 National Book Award for nonfiction.

When Pittsburgh Dad debuted on YouTube, creators Chris Preksta and Curt Wootton little suspected their sitcom would receive more than sixteen million views and turn their blue-collar everyman into a nationally known figure. Illustrated with hilarious black-and-white photos, Pittsburgh Dad shares the best of the best, from rants about swimming pool rules to reflections on coaching little league to curmudgeonly movie reviews. With its heavy dose of nostalgia and pitch-perfect sensibility, Pittsburgh Dad will have readers laughing in recognition, especially those who love recent blockbusters like Sh*t My Dad Says and Dad Is Fat.

A searing, deeply moving memoir about family, love, loss, and forgiveness from the critically acclaimed, bestselling National Book Award-winning author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian.Family relationships are never simple. But Sherman Alexie's bond with his mother Lillian was more complex than most. She plunged her family into chaos with a drinking habit, but shed her addiction when it was on the brink of costing her everything. She survived a violent past, but created an elaborate facade to hide the truth. She selflessly cared for strangers, but was often incapable of showering her children with the affection that they so desperately craved. She wanted a better life for her son, but it was only by leaving her behind that he could hope to achieve it. It's these contradictions that made Lillian Alexie a beautiful, mercurial, abusive, intelligent, complicated, and very human woman.When she passed away, the incongruities that defined his mother shook Sherman and his remembrance of her. Grappling with the haunting ghosts of the past in the wake of loss, he responded the only way he knew how: he wrote. The result is a stunning memoir filled with raw, angry, funny, profane, tender memories of a childhood few can imagine, much less survive. An unflinching and unforgettable remembrance, You Don't Have to Say You Love Me is a powerful, deeply felt account of a complicated relationship.

A Zibby Mag "Most Anticipated Book" * A San Francisco Chronicle "New Book to Cozy Up With" * A Publishers Weekly "Memoirs & Biographies: Top 10" * The Millions "Most Anticipated" * An Electric Lit “Books By Women of Color to Read"“We have more Native stories now, but we have not heard one like this. Whiskey Tender is unexpected and propulsive, indeed tender, but also bold, and beautifully told, like a drink you didn’t know you were thirsty for. This book, never anything less than mesmerizing, is full of family stories and vital Native history. It pulses and it aches, and it lifts, consistently. It threads together so much truth by the time we are done, what has been woven together equals a kind of completeness from brokenness, and a hope from knowing love and loss and love again by naming it so.” — Tommy Orange, National Bestselling Author of There ThereReminiscent of the works of Mary Karr and Terese Marie Mailhot, a memoir of family and survival, coming-of-age on and off the reservation, and of the frictions between mainstream American culture and Native inheritance; assimilation and reverence for tradition.Deborah Jackson Taffa was raised to believe that some sacrifices were necessary to achieve a better life. Her grandparents—citizens of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe—were sent to Indian boarding schools run by white missionaries, while her parents were encouraged to take part in governmental job training off the reservation. Assimilation meant relocation, but as Taffa matured into adulthood, she began to question the promise handed down by her elders and by American society: that if she gave up her culture, her land, and her traditions, she would not only be accepted, but would be able to achieve the “American Dream.”Whiskey Tender traces how a mixed tribe native girl—born on the California Yuma reservation and raised in Navajo territory in New Mexico—comes to her own interpretation of identity, despite her parent’s desires for her to transcend the class and “Indian” status of her birth through education, and despite the Quechan tribe’s particular traditions and beliefs regarding oral and recorded histories. Taffa’s childhood memories unspool into meditations on tribal identity, the rampant criminalization of Native men, governmental assimilation policies, the Red Power movement, and the negotiation between belonging and resisting systemic oppression. Pan-Indian, as well as specific tribal histories and myths, blend with stories of a 1970s and 1980s childhood spent on and off the reservation.Taffa offers a sharp and thought-provoking historical analysis laced with humor and heart. As she reflects on her past and present—the promise of assimilation and the many betrayals her family has suffered, both personal and historical; trauma passed down through generations—she reminds us of how the cultural narratives of her ancestors have been excluded from the central mythologies and structures of the “melting pot” of America, revealing all that is sacrificed for the promise of acceptance.

Douglas Crimp is the rare art critic whose work profoundly influenced a generation of artists. He is best known for his work with the "Pictures Generation"--the very name of which Crimp coined to define the work of artists like Robert Longo and Cindy Sherman who appropriated images from mass culture to carry out a subversive critique. But while his influence is widely recognized, we know little about Crimp's own formative experiences before "Pictures." Before Pictures tells the story of Crimp's life as a young gay man and art critic in New York City during the late 1960s through the turbulent 1970s. Crimp participated in all of what made the city so stimulating in that vibrant decade. The details of his professional and personal life are interwoven with this the particularly rich history of New York City at that time, producing a vivid portrait of both the critic and his adopted city. The book begins with his escape from his hometown in Idaho, and we quickly find Crimp writing criticism for ArtNews while working at the Guggenheim--where, as a young curatorial assistant, he was one of the few to see Daniel Buren's Peinture-Sculpture before it was removed amid cries of institutional censorship. We also travel to the Chelsea Hotel (where Crimp helped the down-on-his-luck couturier Charles James organize his papers) through to his days as a cinephile and balletomane to the founding of the art journal October, where he remained a central figure for many years. As he was developing his reputation as a critic, he was also partaking of the New York night life, from drugs and late nights alongside the Warhol crowd at the Max's Kansas City to discos, roller-skating, and casual sex with famous (and not-so-famous) men. As AIDS began to ravage the closely linked art and gay communities, Crimp eventually turned his attention to activism dedicated to rethinking AIDS. Part biography and part cultural history, Before Pictures is a courageous account of an exceptional period in both Crimp's life and the life of New York City. At the same time, it offers a deeply personal and engaging point of entry into important issues in contemporary art.