Accidental Playboy
Caught in the Ultimate Male Fantasy
-
- $26.99
-
- $26.99
Publisher Description
A freelance writer learns what it's like to be a single, heterosexual guy in an unsteady world when he's invited to travel cross-country for six months on the "Playboy Bus" in search of the Playmate of the Millennium.
Struggling writer Leif Ueland has hit rock bottom: no job, no money, no decent apartment, no girlfriend, and he’s also a really nice guy. Acutely insecure, he’s been trying to get a grip on things with the help of a mentoring therapist. Then the opportunity of a lifetime arrives: Playboy’s Playmate of the Millennium search. Dozens of cities. Thousands of women. And one man covering it all. Suddenly, Leif, a son in a family of feminists, the anti- Hefner, finds himself at the center of a vortex of erotica, sexual harrassment, plastic surgery, stripping, and, always, beautiful women. But what does it mean to be a heterosexual, single guy? Sensitivity to women’s needs? A life full of machismo and meaningless sex? Leif Ueland is about to find out—and tell all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"I scan through the familiar terrain married, mother, 35C... until I come to the final section... She's written: 'I volunteer as a pediatric AIDS worker, which I consider a great honor,' " details Ueland, as he notes yet another ironic, cultural incongruity in his job as the house reporter for Playboy's six-month national search for Playmate of the Millennium. If "35C" and "pediatric AIDS worker" seems to be a contradiction, so is Ueland and his job. He says he's "never been the Playboy guy," and he appears to have gotten this gig because, while working on his novel, he wrote a humorous article about his sexual insecurities entitled "Trials of a Gay-Seeming Straight Male." Indeed, Ueland writes at length here about his therapy sessions dealing with his identity crisis as a heterosexual male who desires women outside of the Playboy paradigm. When Ueland is at his best, this sometimes shapeless, on-the-road memoir crackles with fine, mordant observations, and he can astutely communicate his emotional disjuncture with this project: "I really am invisible, standing in the middle of the crowd. I watch mutely." But too often Ueland's epiphanies feel slightly shop-worn: "These girls, the Myras, Mollys, and Hesters you know what? I'm like them. They're just likable." Frequent name-dropping (Graham Greene, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway), while ironic, looks silly. In the end, Ueland learns that being a heterosexual male doesn't mean being a womanizer, but while his journey is often entertaining, it doesn't yield surprising insights. . But will guys respond? The cover art which is suggestive but not quite titillating might help.
