Save Yourself
Essays
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4.5 • 31 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
This "hilarious and honest" bestselling memoir from a rising comedy star tackles issues of gender, sexuality, feminism, and the Catholic childhood that prepared her for a career as an outspoken lesbian comedian (Abby Wambach).
Cameron Esposito wanted to be a priest and ended up a stand-up comic. Now she would like to tell the whole queer as hell story. Her story. Not the sidebar to a straight person's rebirth-she doesn't give a makeover or plan a wedding or get a couple back together. This isn't a queer tragedy. She doesn't die at the end of this book, having finally decided to kiss the girl. It's the sexy, honest, bumpy, and triumphant dyke's tale her younger, wasn't-allowed-to-watch-Ellen self needed to read. Because there was a long time when she thought she wouldn't make it. Not as a comic, but as a human.
SAVE YOURSELF is full of funny and insightful recollections about everything from coming out (at a Catholic college where sexual orientation wasn't in the nondiscrimination policy) to how joining the circus can help you become a better comic (so much nudity) to accepting yourself for who you are-even if you're, say, a bowl cut-sporting, bespectacled, gender-nonconforming child with an eye patch (which Cameron was). Packed with heart, humor, and cringeworthy stories anyone who has gone through puberty, fallen in love, started a career, or had period sex in Rome can relate to, Cameron's memoir is for that timid, fenced-in kid in all of us-and the fearless stand-up yearning to break free.
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ONE OF BUSTLE'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF MARCH
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Comedian Esposito, who costarred in and cocreated Starz's Take My Wife, delivers "the dyke's tale my younger self needed to read" in this powerful yet often lighthearted memoir of growing up gay in a devout Catholic home. A middle child in a loving Italian household in a Chicago suburb, Esposito was often mistaken for a boy and realized early on that her desires didn't align with the "proper" gender norms she asked for Ken dolls rather than Barbies, and recklessly rode her bike. Her Catholic education intensified her discomfort with her body ("Tampons were a years-long struggle, since as a Catholic, you're not really supposed to root around down there?") and experimenting with boys as a teenager only underlined her desire for women. Finally, after coming out while a student at Boston College (a Catholic college whose "nondiscrimination policy did not include sexual orientation") she had an epiphany: "Shit, I think my Catholicism broke." Esposito is wildly funny and is particularly adept at finding humor in tough moments (when her religious mother asks if she's gay, there was "a pause so pregnant, it had to be induced and then given a C-section"). This entertaining and candid memoir of finding one's identity will resonate with readers doing the same.
Customer Reviews
Amazing.
Just simply amazing and honest.