I read a lot of memoir, and this one jumped immediately to the top reaches of my favorites list. Damon Young is a really excellent writer- each chapter could stand alone as an essay with a very satisfying beginning, middle, and end, but read together they tell a nuanced, intimate, hilarious and honest story of his life growing up black and neurotic in Pittsburgh. As a kid, he and his parents navigated lower middle class, a series of near-financial disasters that were always precariously recovered from. Damon shaped his early identity around his love of and talent at basketball, which landed him a full-ride scholarship to Canisius College. It was there his career as a writer began, from the humble beginnings of a series of terrible, semi-plagiarized poems written to woo a long-term crush. The romance was unsuccessful, but the poems sent him in the direction of blogging, back when doing so was still a novelty. Post-college he co-founded a site called Very Smart Brothas, which still runs pop culture reviews and social commentary to this day, and landed a writing job at Ebony magazine. This book entertainingly chronicles his relationships with girlfriends, with barbers, with parents, with the n-word, with friends, with basketball, and his career (both successes and big mistakes). Buy this book and shelve it with Shrill, Sissy, Hunger, She Wants It, and Bad Feminist.