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Title details for Attempting Normal by Marc Maron - Available

Attempting Normal

by Marc Maron
ebook
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2 of 2 copies available
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
People make a mess.
 
Marc Maron was a parent-scarred, angst-filled, drug-dabbling, love-starved comedian who dreamed of a simple life: a wife, a home, a sitcom to call his own. But instead he woke up one day to find himself fired from his radio job, surrounded by feral cats, and emotionally and financially annihilated by a divorce from a woman he thought he loved. He tried to heal his broken heart through whatever means he could find—minor-league hoarding, Viagra addiction, accidental racial profiling, cat fancying, flying airplanes with his mind—but nothing seemed to work. It was only when he was stripped down to nothing that he found his way back.
 
Attempting Normal is Marc Maron’s journey through the wilderness of his own mind, a collection of explosively, painfully, addictively funny stories that add up to a moving tale of hope and hopelessness, of failing, flailing, and finding a way. From standup to television to his outrageously popular podcast, WTF with Marc Maron, Marc has always been a genuine original, a disarmingly honest, intensely smart, brutally open comic who finds wisdom in the strangest places. This is his story of the winding, potholed road from madness and obsession and failure to something like normal, the thrillingly comic journey of a sympathetic f***up who’s trying really hard to do better without making a bigger mess. Most of us will relate.
Praise for Attempting Normal
 
“I laughed so hard reading this book.”—David Sedaris
 
“Funny . . . surprisingly deep . . . laced with revelatory insights.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“Superb . . . A reason that [it] is a superior example of an overcrowded genre—the comedian memoir—is Mr. Maron’s hardheaded approach to his history, the wisdom of experience.”—The New York Times
 
“Marc Maron is a legend because he is both a great comic and a brilliant mind. Attempting Normal is a deep, hilarious megashot of feeling and truth as only this man can administer.”—Sam Lipsyte
  
Praise for Marc Maron and WTF
 
“The stuff of comedy legend.”—Rolling Stone 
 
“Marc Maron is a startlingly honest, compelling, and hilarious comedian-poet. Truly one of the greatest of all time.”—Louis C.K.
 
“I’ve known Marc for years and I can tell you first hand that he’s passionate, fearless, honest, self-absorbed, neurotic, and screamingly funny.”—David Cross
 
“Revered among his peers . . . raw and unflinchingly honest.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Devastatingly funny.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“For a comedy nerd, this show is nirvana.”—Judd Apatow

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    July 16, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9780679644132

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9780679644132
      • File size: 2576 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      June 1, 2013
      A comedian's life is no laughing matter in this memoir of short chapters that examine the author's source of material as a series of open wounds. Rarely has an entertainer's account of his life been so lacking in self-glorification. "There really is no business like show business," he told a group of his peers as the keynote speaker for the 2011 Just for Laughs Comedy Festival in Montreal. "Except maybe prostitution. There's a bit of overlap there." The speech provides the penultimate chapter of Maron's first book and shows why he enjoyed the respect of so many better-known comedians even before he resurrected his career by shifting it from the comedy club to his garage with his popular podcast WTF with Marc Maron. In his introduction, he explains the development of the cyberseries, which appeared to be a last-ditch effortand which went viral through the host's interviews with guests such as Conan O'Brien. Though he'd appeared on O'Brien's show more than 40 times, he treats that exposure like an afterthought, as he explains the secret of success that O'Brien shared with him and which he now believes explains his own: " 'Get yourself in a situation where you have no choice.' And that's what I'm doing, because I had no choice. I was broke and broken and lost when I started WTF." If such desperation pushed the comedian beyond his comfort level (presuming he had one), his book might do the same for readers, as Maron recounts his dysfunctional childhood, his two failed marriages (and his part in each split), his addictions, recovery and sobriety, and his ambivalence toward pornography (which he both likes a lot and really doesn't). In that same speech, he says, "we comics are out there on the front lines of our sanity. We risk all sense of security and the possibility of living stable lives to do comedy." In a blood sport littered with casualties, this is an account of an unlikely survivor.

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • OverDrive Read
  • EPUB ebook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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