Glen Weldon Recommended Books

In the vein of New York Times bestsellers Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling and We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, a collection of side-splitting yet introspective essays by the popular stand-up comic, Chelsea Lately alum, host of truTV’s The Talk Show Game Show, and writer for The Mindy Project.From a young age, Guy Branum always felt as if he were on the outside looking in.Self-taught, introspective, and from a stiflingly boring farm town, he couldn’t relate to his neighbors. While other boys played outside, he stayed indoors reading Greek mythology. And being gay and overweight, he got used to being invisible. But little by little, he started learning from all the sad, strange, lonely outcasts in history who had come before him, and he started to feel hope. In this collection of personal essays, Guy talks about finding a sense of belonging at Berkeley—and stirring up controversy in a newspaper column that led to a run‑in with the Secret Service. He recounts the pitfalls of being typecast as the “Sassy Gay Friend,” and how, after taking a wrong turn in life (i.e. law school), he found stand‑up comedy and artistic freedom.Digressing from his personal narratives, Guy also argues why Katy Perry’s “California Girls” is the Aristotelian ideal of a summer jam, and how brunch, as a fundamentally unnecessary but delightful meal, is deeply gay. He analyzes society’s calculated deprivation of personhood from fat people, and though it’s taken him awhile to accept who he is, Guy has learned that with a little patience and a lot of humor, self-acceptance is possible.