Humor, Essays, General & Miscellaneous Biography, Women's Biography, General Reference, Women's Biography
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Overview
Raised in Manhattan by her overprotective sex-therapist mother (who wore “nine inches of shoulder pads”), Wendy Spero has always sought excitement in microthrills, the small, strange highs that give her life meaning—from finding a strip tease video of her grandmother to selling knives door-to-door. As a little girl, Spero passed the time sniffing fruit-scented markers and breaking up arguments between her imaginary friends. As an adult, in her first office job, she formed an unusual relationship with her boss that involved as much marijuana-smoking as it did mentoring. Called “a profoundly funny human being” by Time Out New York, Spero is now a comedian living in L.A., grappling with such grown-up issues as trying to kick her addiction to eating candy in bed and learning how to drive.Synopsis
Raised in Manhattan by her overprotective sex-therapist mother (who wore “nine inches of shoulder pads”), Wendy Spero has always sought excitement in microthrills, the small, strange highs that give her life meaning—from finding a strip tease video of her grandmother to selling knives door-to-door. As a little girl, Spero passed the time sniffing fruit-scented markers and breaking up arguments between her imaginary friends. As an adult, in her first office job, she formed an unusual relationship with her boss that involved as much marijuana-smoking as it did mentoring. Called “a profoundly funny human being” by Time Out New York, Spero is now a comedian living in L.A., grappling with such grown-up issues as trying to kick her addiction to eating candy in bed and learning how to drive.Editorials
The New York Times
In her effervescent, delightfully neurotic memoir...Spero works...magic on paper.Ed Helms
Microthrills will make you cringe with glee. Spero takes you inside her peculiar mind and tiny, hilarious world with a brazen vulnerability that is the rare province of truly great humorists. She has a singular and completely warped view of the world, able to find poignancy and jubilation in life's nagging minutiae. David Sedaris watch your back! (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart)Daily Candy
A hilarious memoir ... with lots of laugh-so-hard-you-snort-milk-out-of-your-nose moments.Kirkus Reviews
These essays by up-and-coming comedian Spero, about childhood and coming-of-age in New York, are akin to David Rakoff's Fraud, but lacking that book's the wit and insight. Living with her single mother (her father died when she was ten months old), the author had an experience familiar to many Manhattan kids: trick-or-treating in apartment buildings; feeling a twinge of envy when visiting relatives in the suburbs, but always glad to return to the city; arguing, like teens everywhere, over curfew. What saves Spero's chronicle of her youthful escapades from being overwhelmingly tedious is her tender but comic portrait of her family. Her grandparents played an especially large role in her life; the author captures their bereavement over their son's early death with pathos, never sentimentality. She draws a hilarious portrait of her mother, a petite sex therapist, who constantly lectured Spero about sex: "Real lovemaking involves active communication," she told her 11-year-old. "Active, active communication. . . . And a lot of hard work." Still, the sex-therapist-mom shtick grows old quickly, and the college and early-adulthood pieces trade on cliches: the quest for a normal roommate, the ruminations over whether to marry her boyfriend, the woes of the office job, the occasional drug use. Spero's attempts at humor are often just silly. To wit, her meditation on fruit-scented markers: She loves them, but always finds their intense smell frustrating. Despite their wonderful, olfactory fruitiness, "there is simply no fruity climax . . . no, Fruity, fruity, yes, perfect, oh yeah, YES . . . Ah. Enough." These pieces may work onstage in Spero's one-woman show, but on the page,they fall flat.Book Details
Published
August 3, 2006
Publisher
Penguin Group (USA)
Pages
256
ISBN
9781101218006