All Things Aside

Shlesinger Iliza Shlesinger

Description

From the razor-sharp mind of comedian Iliza Shlesinger, a collection of hilarious and insightful essays about the exasperating issues of everyday life"Iliza is exceptionally funny. If this book doesn't make you laugh, it means you can't read. In which case, disregard." -Jimmy Kimmel"A book for everyone wrestling with what it means to show up for ourselves and the world today. I love Iliza, and I love her advice." -Rebecca Serle, New York Times bestselling author of One Italian Summer "Send me a copy of your book and I'll read it." -Sharon Stone"All Things Aside . . . is Iliza: fresh, funny, and a reinvention of the form." -Ted Sarandos, co-CEO, NetflixAll Things Aside is a punchy, honest, incisive book that shares a view of the world through the eyes of the inimitable Iliza Shlesinger. From the macro to micro, Shlesinger tackles it all with her no-bullshit comedic style.Throughout the book, Shlesinger dives from one subject into the next, making her hilarious asides the meat of her stories, much like she does in her stand-up comedy. Topics range from dissecting social expectations to the notion that products marketed specifically to women are scams, and all manner of things in between. She even dares to ask herself the all-important question that every woman is forced to consider at some point-Am I actually an annoying person? Shlesinger also shares intimate moments, including a devastating miscarriage, which she manages to navigate not only with grace but somehow with side-splitting humor.As Margaret Cho explains in the book's foreword, "Every woman has something to gain from the Everywoman Iliza presents in her hilarious and astute worldview. . . . I've learned [from Iliza] that you don't have to quit when you are in pain, that you can write your way out of the suffering. That there is beautiful truth to be unearthed from the depths of despair. That the stupid can be smart and that we put ourselves through hell for nothing." All Things Aside offers unexpected insights, much-needed truths, and tons and tons of laughs.

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 11 octobre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781647005726
• Langue: English

Extrait

Editor: Samantha Weiner
Designer: Danielle Youngsmith
Managing Editor: Glenn Ramirez
Production Manager: Rachael Marks
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933706
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5940-6 eISBN: 978-1-64700-572-6
Copyright 2022 Iliza Shlesinger
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams Image, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Margaret Cho
Intro
Nostalgia
Having It All
Everything Is a Scam
Where Have All the Hot Boys Gone?
Miscarriage
A Baby! Tell Me Everything
Act Like a Person
High-Maintenance
Annoying Court
Tradition
Unplugging
Legal Forty
All Things Aside
Acknowledgments
FOREWORD by Margaret Cho
As you hold this book, know that you are in the mind of an exceptional author. Iliza lives her life critically and without illusions, and that clarity is hard-won from experience. I wish I was younger and had Iliza to guide me, but I still learn from her, even as someone who s older than her. I ve learned that you don t have to quit when you are in pain, that you can write your way out of the suffering. That here is beautiful truth to be unearthed from the depths of despair. That the stupid can be smart, and that we put ourselves through hell for nothing. In her work, Iliza often casts herself as an Everywoman-and I understand that inclination-but the truth is, we would all be lucky if we were more like her. Every woman has something to gain from the Everywoman that Iliza presents in her hilarious and astute worldview.
Oh, I wish I had thought of that! is the thing that I think a lot when watching Iliza onstage. That is pretty much the highest compliment I can give. Or any comic can give. You cope better than me. That is what that statement is saying. That is jokes. Coping. Complaining. Competing-with one another, but mostly, really, with ourselves, or the notion of ourselves. We have it sort of figured out, but even if we don t, it is entertaining nonetheless. And that is all that really matters.
INTRO
Here s why I wrote this book this way and why I wrote this book now.
Onstage, I love a verbal parenthetical. I love a btw, and I love clarifying the previous with hyperspecific details and references and staying in the pocket on a joke. I love revealing that I, deep down, don t actually fully agree with what I just posited, but I didn t have enough room in that sentence to convey that, so here s the reality of it all. The problem is, in print, all the funny asides that color the story can be distracting. Too many commas and footnotes are annoying to read, right? Like, who really wants a clever footnote? That means you have to . . .
Read the sentence.
Keep your place on the page.
Then scan to the bottom. *
Then retrace where you were on the page and mentally get back into what you were reading.
It s too much mood shifting for a silly aside that wasn t so important that it needed to be included in the body of the text but was important enough to be included on the page and ruin your reading flow.
I say, if the information was worth writing down, give it a proper place on the page. So I thought, What if I just formatted my book differently?
What if the structure of the book is built around how my brain really works? The bones that support the essay are there, but the meat, the tasty meat of it, the comedy and purpose and reflection, are in the indented asides;
the deeply personal anecdotes, the confessions, and the context that give my point of view its color are all right there for you to see.
Plainly put, I wrote the type of essays that I would want to read. I give my-at times sentimental, but always honest and hopefully funny-perspective on everything, macro to micro, all-encompassing topics like aging, miscarriages, social decency, nostalgia, having it all, and, finally, I confront the most important question of all, one that I wish more people would ask themselves: Am I actually an annoying person?
But I ll be honest, this book didn t pour out of me. A few chapters were easy, but I wrote those, and then I found myself avoiding writing this book for months on end. It wasn t writer s block, it was self-imposed fear. I started to feel like I had nothing to say on the page. Like the weight of my views and opinions wasn t heavy enough to push against the weight of pain the world was in, that the gravity of what I had to say would be rejected because I wasn t, in a funny book, acknowledging the oppression, repression, and horrific situations people everywhere were and are dealing with.
The fear of being canceled by the Internet, the saccharine and often performative wokeness of pop culture are a constant threat to comedy. The endless sophistry of telling someone they can t have an opinion because they didn t consider everyone else s opinion wrecks progress and levity.
I can t stand when they automatically put a plastic straw in my water.
Don t drink any water; we re in a drought!
Oh, so you don t want Black Lives Matter protesters to have water?
Why are you posting about BLM when Israel is under attack?
Why are you even typing the word Israel ? Do you hate Palestinians? Are you Islamophobic?! Educate yourself.
If you love being Muslim, why do you eat pork?
Why are you cutting out pork when it s red meat from cows that produce methane emissions? Do better.
Oh, so you only care about cows but not trans lives?
So trans lives matter, but my right to have a gun in my home doesn t matter? SMH. Do your own research.
Not everyone can afford a home; stop glamorizing unattainable wealth!
Why are you anti-glamour? Makeup matters! Be better!
WHAT ABOUT THE LIVES OF THE BUGS THEY CRUSH UP TO MAKE THE MAKEUP?! SAVE THE BEETLES, EAT THE RICH! Educate yourself and be better and do your own research, and I m still SMH but also laugh crying and triggered!!
But that anger, that fear of being misunderstood and ruined over it, is very real. And I was afraid anything I said would deliberately be taken out of context and used by someone who had no real agenda other than just making noise to cancel me.
I became scared and overwhelmed by all these external factors. I delivered the first draft of this book in September of 2021. So that would be the fall after about a year and a half of the world, specifically the US, being an absolute fucking Gong Show . Just a huge mess. Everything was so heavy all the time. Every Internet check became endless doom-scrolling through bad news tempered by only slightly less bad news. Reality was bleak, online rage and righteous indignation were rampant, people were on higher horses (Clydesdales?) than ever and angrier and more scared than I d seen in my lifetime. Personal agendas took the place of civil discourse, conversations, and even scientific facts. Whatever you were politically or socially was wrong depending on who decided to observe you that day.
However you felt was discounted because whoever you were, you were blind to someone else s misfortune and, therefore, a bad person. Everyone was an expert on race, disease, the Middle East, and environmentalism, and almost everyone was right and wrong at the same time, all the time.
The paralysis many people felt due to the constant inundation of bad news was numbing. It is numbing. But, as an artist, I always try. It s my job to make comedy out of tragedy and to-get ready to clutch your pearls, folks-have a point of view and make people laugh.
Every time I sat down to write, I would get hungry or tired. At around twenty-one weeks pregnant, sure, a woman is always hungry and a little tired, but this wasn t about the baby. It was like I had mini depression but only when I opened this Word doc. This was about me giving in to the idea that anything you say either can and will be held against you or discounted simply because it isn t important enough. In 2021, the world was not a great place, and what I didn t want was for that to affect my writing and then you pick this up for a fun beach read in 2022, and it s all coronavirus/ global warming/public outrage and other clickbait that s actually about something serious.
I felt I had nothing to say on a page , specifically. Onstage at a live show, I have plenty to say, my act is a living, breathing, mutating thing. But a book is forever. There was this overwhelming, personally imposed imperative that when this book came out, I would still feel the things I felt when I wrote the book over a year ago.
And thus: I put it off.
I found myself thinking, Who wants to hear me lampoon everyday things in a book? And then I thought, But if I don t do it, someone else will. And then I ll be stuck trying to find an outlet to complain about whoever stole my ideas to write a book where I m complaining. I don t care about those people or their malformed opinons. This isn t even a real conversation! I m creating my own prison! Better to have tried, because most people can t even do that . And then I thought, I should be writing down all the little honest side conversations I m having with myself because this is insane yet relatable and that s the funny part!
And here we are. This book is an open book, so to speak.
I m gonna talk about so many things that I think are either wholly relatable or weird, quirky things that, sure, might only happen to me, but it s in their weirdness th