BOOK REVIEW: Microthrills: True Stories from a Life of Small Highs by Wendy Spero
David Sedaris, watch out — take a look at the memoir through a more relatable set of lenses
By Caralyn Green
Published: August 1st, 2006 | 2:36pm
What's so appealing about comedian Wendy Spero's new book, Microthrills: True Stories from a Life of Small Highs
And that's just what Spero provides. With her Wonder Years-on-Pixy Stix collection of sweetly funny nonfiction vignettes, Spero lets us in on what could very well be the secret to her Comedy Central, VH1, NPR and New York Times-spanning success: That even the most seemingly trivial and incoherent moments in life can be the ones in which we find the most beauty, insight, and humor.
While Spero adroitly channels fellow memoir master David Sedaris, her coming-of-age stories are a little less fantastic, and a lot more relatable. I mean, I have zero experience staging drug-addled performance art or hitchhiking with a quadriplegic (hats off to Sedaris for having had those experiences, though). However, I certainly can relate to being the quirky urban Jewish girl with an affinity for candy, stuffed animals, and discount designer fashions. And from one quirky urban Jewish girl to another — Wendy, mazel tov, you nailed it.
With a sly profundity, Spero celebrates the small strangeness' of life — growing up as the only child of a widowed sex therapist mom with more neuroses than Woody Allen; moving up to the more challenging fifth grade math group despite hives-inducing fears of inadequacy; screening potential flat-mates based on their reactions to her extensive finger puppet collection; and selling knives door-to-door because what else is a college recent grad with a resume of "why society is bad" classes supposed to do?
Sometimes Spero's punch-lines are buried and sometimes I think they don't exist. But the few missteps seem inconsequential compared to how many times I actually chuckled out loud and nodded in agreement while reading her witty observations on why driving is weird ("I still see driving as an exceptionally mature activity only to be performed by my mom's friends who live in the country") and why nature is so very terrifying ("It all came down to the fact that, despite nature's obvious aesthetic glory, fundamentally there was really no one in charge").
With its whimsical, minutiae-obsessed irreverence, Microthrills is sure to bring some pleasantly small highs to any reader's life.
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ABOUT THE BOOK:
Microthrills: True Stories from a Life of Small Highs
By Wendy Spero
256 pages
$21.95
Issue #23
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