Didn’t leave a strong impression. Didn’t make me laugh out loud of think too hard. Couple thoughts made me go “hmm interesting” but that was about it.

i was waiting for my library to receive the audiobook every since i heard zach speak on a podcast, and i snapped it up as soon as i got the notification! the narration was well done and honestly soothing to listen to. a humorous and personal collection of stories that i really enjoyed

This is one of those books that is funny with just a little bit of depression enough to make you sad bc the author’s religious trauma is on full display in this book as well as the ridiculousness of the world right now. He’s like a mix between Sam Irby and David Sedaris

Funny, sincere, and annoyingly relatable

Felt like a quicker dirtier version of Here For It by R Eric Thomas, which I loved, so I enjoyed it!

“Turns out the secret to salvation from Hell is to stop believing in it.”

Pop Quiz: What do you get when you take the insecure oddball from a Bible-thumping evangelical family in the heart of God's Country, Virginia and expose him to, like, literally any perspective other than the one he was raised with? Answer: Exactly the kind of person you'd expect to grow up and write a collection of humorous essays.

I’ll start with the praise: this book wins the award for greatest title in the history of the English language. It perfectly fits the tone of the collection: full of sardonic, dry wit with a peppering of moral and spiritual existentialism for good measure. Just how I like it.
And I’ll give credit where it’s due: Zach Zimmerman is quite funny. There were quite a few times during my read that I let loose a little chuckle. One of my personal favorite lines was in the essay aptly titled “Matchmaker, Matchmaker” where Zimmerman writes, “The only way I survived thirty back-to-back performances of Fiddler on the Roof was by pretending I was God.” As a recovering high school theater person, that one hit particularly close to home.

But the unfortunate thing about this book is that, oddly enough, it seems to struggle with its identity (considering a lot of it is about finding identity, this is a bit ironic). Zimmerman seems to have trouble maintaining cohesion, which results in what feels a bit like literary whiplash. For example, by far the most engaging essay in the collection was "#2." It's deeply personal, heart-wrenching, and shows a vulnerability that comes off as more genuine than in any of the sections on heartbreak. It seems a bit strange to follow up such a moving piece with a story about...Red Lobster? That's like how Taylor Swift decided to follow up "All Too Well" with "22." It's just a bit of an odd pivot.

Although the majority of the book is well-written, some of it does come off like an attempt to meet the page requirement. Most of the lists read a bit like if Rupi Kaur's milk and honey possessed a modicum of self-awareness, which is about as backhanded of a compliment as one can dole out. There's also a repeated sight gag in the sections titled "Evidence for the Existence of God" and "How to Write a Eulogy" that just felt entirely unnecessary. It wasn't particularly funny or profound the first time, and it definitely wasn't funny or profound the second time.

Spoiler

Spoiler Alert: Both pages are blank. Har-de-har-har, I guess.

And now, ladies and gents, is the time for my personal beef with the book (aka the things I didn't enjoy but aren't, like, objectively things I can hold against it). The first qualm I have is that it is almost aggressively Millennial, which, you know, makes sense given the author falls into that category. It's not that the jokes didn't translate, or the references weren't understood. It's more that the overall tone was, at times, cloyingly...cringe (and, yes, I realize by accusing a Millennial of being cringe, I'm coming off as aggressively Gen Z. Well joke's on you; I'm actually a cusper). Take the section "Some Things That Are Hard to Find." It takes the form of a word search with terms like "true love," "yourself," and "meaning" in the word bank. I'm sure my distaste for this saccharine type of self-help, “I can’t even” kind of thing is because I primarily belong to the generation that discounts trends and styles almost immediately after they enter the zeitgeist and the fact that we've relegated anything that seems like it belongs on Tumblr in 2014 to the hidden annals of internet history, where we hope the final vestiges of this breed of online humor/quasi-poetry will never again see the light of day. But undoubtedly, there’s a subsection of the population that enjoys this kind of content (specifically, readers born between 1981 and 1996), but it's a bit inadvertently alienating.

I harbor no ill will toward the author (on the contrary; I hope he continues to hone his craft and find his audience), so I'll end on a positive note. As a whole, this was an enjoyable read. Although it vacillated between a number of contradictory moods at times, none of it was bad. Far from it. Zimmerman has a charm that comes off effortlessly on the page and it is precisely that voice that propels the reader forward. I'd be interested to read anything he writes in the future with the hope that he smooths out some of the speedbumps that got in the way of my full enjoyment of this.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for the eARC.