Start Without Me
(I'll Be There in a Minute)
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The New York Times Bestseller!
Named one of Vulture's “10 Best Comedy Books of 2022”
From New York Times bestselling author, and Family Guy writer Gary Janetti comes Start Without Me, a collection of hilarious, laugh out loud, true life stories about the small moments that add up to a big life.
Gary Janetti is bothered. By a lot of things. And thank God he’s here to tell us.
In Start Without Me, Gary returns with his acid tongue firmly in cheek to the moments and times that defined him. He takes us by the hand as we follow him through the summers he spends in his twenties, pursuing both the perfect tan and the perfect man to no avail and much regret. At his Catholic high school, he strikes up an unlikely friendship with a nun who shares Gary's love of soap operas, which becomes a salvation to them both. And don't get him started on how a bad hotel room can ruin even the best vacation. This laugh-out-loud collection of true-life stories from the man “behind his generation’s greatest comedy” (The New York Times) is for anyone who has felt the joy in holding a decade-long grudge.
Whether you are a new convert to Janetti or one of the million who follow him on social media for a daily laugh, Start Without Me will have you howling at Gary's frustrations and nodding along in agreement at the outrages of life's small slights. It's the literary equivalent of a night out with your funniest friend that you wish would never end.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Writer and producer Janetti (Do You Mind If I Cancel?) briskly trots through the most memorable moments of his life in this hilarious outing. In vignettes packed with zingers ("The Catholics are the RuPaul's Drag Race of religions. We put on a show, honey"), he reveals how his refusal to live on any terms but his own took root early when, instead of going out to play as a kid in the 1970s, he opted to watch The Carol Burnett Show in his basement. Sports weren't his calling, either (their rules were "as indecipherable to me as ancient Greek"), though track wasn't bad—"All gay people can run, so no problem there." While his strength lies firmly in his acerbic humor, Janetti has a softer side, too, as seen when he writes of finding a home in theater in college and waxes poetic about Judy Garland, proclaiming The Wizard of Oz to be the "gayest" film of all time: "At only sixteen years old already knows real pain. The kind of pain that most gay children can also identify with." His views on raising a child today are perfectly calibrated, too: "No, thanks, I'm not equipped to deal with whatever the fuck is coming... after TikTok." Pithy and profane, this entertains from start to finish.
