Sure, I'll Join Your Cult
A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere
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- €9.49
Publisher Description
From “weird, scary, ingenious” (The New York Times) stand-up comedian Maria Bamford, an instant New York Times bestselling, brutally honest, and “laugh-out-loud funny” (Jennette McCurdy, #1 New York Times bestselling author) memoir about show business, mental health, and the comfort of rigid belief systems—from Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, to Richard Simmons, to 12-step programs.
Maria Bamford is a comedian’s comedian (an outsider among outsiders) and has forever fought to find a place to belong. From struggling with an eating disorder as a child of the 1980s, to navigating a career in the arts (and medical debt and psychiatric institutionalization), she has tried just about every method possible to not only be a part of the world, but to want to be a part of it.
In Bamford’s “trademark blend of disarming intimacy and dark whimsy” (Publishers Weekly), Sure, I’ll Join Your Cultbrings us on a quest to participate in something. With sincerity and transparency, she recounts every anonymous fellowship she has joined (including but not limited to: Debtors Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, and Overeaters Anonymous), every hypomanic episode (from worrying about selling out under capitalism to enforcing union rules on her Netflix TV show set to protect her health), and every easy 1-to-3-step recipe for fudge in between.
Packed with “Bamford’s brilliance, relentless humor, and insatiable instinct for survival (Library Journal), this memoir explores what it means to keep going, and to be a member of society (or any group she’s invited to) despite not being very good at it. In turn, she hopes to transform isolating experiences into comedy that will make you feel less alone (without turning into a cult following).
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Comedian Maria Bamford takes you on a chaotic tour of her life, mental health, and the various cults she’s joined. In her hilarious memoir, she talks about struggling with OCD in her youth (she would routinely check to see if she’d killed her friends after a night out), her eventual bipolar diagnosis, and her attempts to muddle through adulthood while finding herself drawn into one “cult” after another. From Suzuki-method violin training to Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, she’s refreshingly honest and self-deprecating about each experience of joining a self-improvement program. (We love how she gently mocks 12-step programs while still offering useful advice on how to succeed with them.) It’s rare to find this level of genuine candour and authenticity from an author, but if you’ve ever seen Bamford’s no-filter stand-up, it all tracks. As funny as it is harrowing Sure, I’ll Join Your Cult is a wonderfully strange and endearing read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stand-up comedian Bamford catalogs all the "cults" she's joined—from Debtors Anonymous to "Suzuki-method violin training"—in search of structure and community in her hilarious, eyebrow-raising debut memoir. "I'm not suicidal, but I'm not particularly psyched," Bamford begins, teeing up for an honest account of her childhood OCD, early-adult recklessness, and eventual diagnosis with bipolar disorder, all of which compelled her to seek the organizing comforts of various 12-step programs. But "this is not going to have a clear chronicle of trauma, healing, victory," Bamford writes. "It's going to be more like a series of sudoku puzzles that I grow tired of trying to solve and a third of the way through start a new one, hoping it's easier." The anecdotes run the gamut from lighthearted (visiting Yellowstone's Old Faithful with her father and sister as a child) to worrying (moving to New Zealand with an obviously gay clown she'd fallen for after a few dates), and chapters are punctuated with tongue-in-cheek recipes "that only take a minute of wavering focus" to prepare, such as "chip off the floor" and "peanut butter between pieces of cheese." It's all delivered with Bamford's trademark blend of disarming intimacy and dark whimsy. The result is a consistently funny and occasionally heartbreaking glimpse into a unique comedic mind.
