The Actual One
How I Tried, and Failed, to Avoid Adulthood Forever
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A hilarious, razor-sharp debut memoir about the moment when you realize that your friends have all grown up and left you behind, for readers of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and Kelly Williams Brown’s Adulting. Isy Suttie wakes up one day in her late twenties to discover that the deal she’d struck with her friends, to put off growing up for as long as possible, had been entirely in her head. Everyone around her is suddenly into mortgages, farmers’ markets, and going off the Pill, rather than running naked into the sea or getting hammered in a country pub with eighty-year-old men.
After a particularly crushing breakup precipitated by Isy’s gifting of a human-size papier-mâché penguin to her boyfriend, her dearest friend advises Isy not to worry: the next guy she meets will be The Actual One.
Heartened by this promise, Isy decides to keep delaying the onset of adulthood, whether that means standing on the side of a highway in nothing but an old fur coat and sneakers, dating a man who speaks only in rhyme, or conquering her fears of Alpine skiing by wildly overestimating her athletic ability. Insightful and laugh-out-loud funny, The Actual One is an ode to the confusing wilderness of your late twenties, alongside a quest for a genuinely good relationship . . . or at the very least, a good story to tell.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Suttie's debut memoir tackles what it's like to be left behind when your friends take the leap to marriage, having babies, and buying houses and you're not sure you want to follow. After Suttie, a British comedian and writer, went through a difficult break-up with a longtime boyfriend, her newly pregnant friend, told her that getting "the one" out of the way just means she's ready to find "the actual one." Fighting the idea of coupling and adulthood, Suttie set out to enjoy her time as a single woman. As she narrates this experience, she shares her path from struggling as a comic and actress, making ends meet by working in a call center for a nearly bankrupt meal delivery service, to having her passion cover her living expenses. The reader gets to know Suttie through her stories of getting heckled off stage, drinking at pubs, and spending time with friends, all while trying to figure out her love life and the changes around her. Overall this is an entertaining read, but at times her stories fall flat, like they're missing a punch line, and readers unfamiliar with British idioms may find that whole passages feel like reading a foreign language.
