Failure Is an Option
An Attempted Memoir
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
“Writing this funny requires immense talent.”
—AV Club
H. Jon Benjamin—the lead voice behind Archer and Bob's Burgers—helps us all feel a little better about our own failures by sharing his own in a hilarious memoir-ish chronicle of failure.
Most people would consider H. Jon Benjamin a comedy show business success. But he'd like to remind everyone that as great as success can be, failure is also an option. And maybe the best option. In this book, he tells stories from his own life, from his early days ("wherein I'm unable to deliver a sizzling fajita") to his romantic life ("how I failed to quantify a threesome") to family ("wherein a trip to P.F. Chang's fractures a family") to career ("how I failed at launching a kid's show").
As Jon himself says, breaking down one's natural ability to succeed is not an easy task, but also not an insurmountable one. Society as we know it is, sadly, failure averse. But more acceptance of failure, as Jon sees it, will go a long way to making this world a different place . . . a kinder, gentler place, where gardens are overgrown and most people stay home with their pets. A vision of failure, but also a vision of freedom.
With stories, examples of artistic and literary failure, and a powerful can't-do attitude, Failure Is an Option is the book the world doesn't need right now but will get regardless.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this rambling collection of random anecdotes, comedian Benjamin (the voice of characters in the Archer and Bob's Burgers TV series) tells of his life failures. Stringing together short chapters better suited for standup routines, Benjamin provides fodder for the clich that learning from failure provides a way forward in life. He can be a hilarious storyteller who fires off witty one-liners (looking back on playing catch with his neighbors, he concludes that "the curveball is the oral sex of baseball. It's delicate and precarious"), but even those grow tiresome after a while. In a chapter titled "The Early Failure Years," he attributes his occasional dizziness and his incredible laziness to his mother's being given nitrous oxide during his birth; later, he lists his various business failures, including an idea for a restaurant called "Leftovers,"which would cut down on food waste and provide cheap meals by serving leftovers. In one of his funnier observations (from a chapter subtitled "How I Failed Hosting a Bar Mitzvah"), Benjamin points to the adolescent character of the present U.S. president: "Teens are a grisly combination of suppressed rage, sexual confusion, vanity, and unrelenting incompetence... just imagine Donald Trump but more agile." On stage, these anecdotes might work well, but on the page they are cloying and tedious.
