My Life as a Goddess

[alaterdate]

My Life as a Goddess by Guy Branum isn't the type of book I usually read. Meaning I don't read memoirs. The last memoir I read was pre-2010 unless you count The Keys by DJ Khaled that I read in 2017 which I think was intended to be more of a self-help book. I have no idea why I don't read memoirs even though I love reading about people's days on Twitter and here on Dreamwidth. It might be that I don't particularly care about celebrities so I don't gravitate toward that kind of book (even though not all memoirs are about celebrities. And the one I read before 2010 was about a Chinese woman's family and was really good!). Anyway, this book was in delphi's End of Year: Ten Best Reads of 2019 The excerpt caught my attention so I borrowed the book from my local library and I liked it!

I vaguely remember Guy from Chelsea Lately which I hardly ever watched because 1. I've never watched much TV to begin with 2. I didn't like Chelsea Handler. This book is benign on the celebrity gossip and focuses more on Guy's background growing up in Sutter County, California. I was born and raised in Southern California and I've heard of the "nothing" in mid-cali with all the farms that use way too much water to grow almonds, but Guy paints a picture that finally makes it a real place in my mind. An interesting place too, despite how terrible he thinks it is and which it may be, I have never been there. My favorite parts of the book were the chapters that talked about his home town and childhood.

This book reads as a collection of essays on pop-culture and how the author's life ties into them, how his experiences lead to the conclusions he's writing. (Hence the subtitle A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture.) Now, I'm not very versed in pop-culture and definitely not as much as Guy so the explanations of movies and TV shows were really helpful and put everything in context for me. The many, many footnotes were informative and hilarious too. They read like asides sometimes and I enjoyed that. There was a surprising amount of facts and mythological stories told in this book which I enjoyed too. I feel like I got the best of both worlds reading this. There is a really good essay about his father and their relationship in there too.

The downsides to the book were that sometimes the chapters would tangent off into other things with no proper transitions and go on so long that I'd forget what the chapter was even about in the first place. Tying it all together in the end was a 50/50 chance. Another thing is that some of his stories are cringey-sorry to use the word lol-to me and I glossed over some of it, but it's commendable that he wasn't trying to make himself look perfect and "told his truth."

I also found out that he wrote a lot of the skits for X-Play on G4 and I loved those!. My brother and I still quote them sometimes.