| Title | : | Randy: The Full and Complete Unedited Biography and Memoir of the Amazing Life and Times of Randy S.! |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1576879720 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781576879726 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 240 |
| Publication | : | Published January 10, 2023 |
A self-published memoir of a Maryland thirty-something found by author Mike Sacks at a garage sale in 2019 and re-published here for the first time. The memoir is written by the struggling poet and novelist Noah B., who is embedded in the mind and lifestyle of a perversely unexceptional American asshole named Randy. Like Pale Fire if it were about a Danny McBride-style fuckup, the story is both unmoored from time and eerily prescient of our own—one so stupid and unbelievable that it requires a writer like Sacks to bring it to light.
“If you don’t know who Mike Sacks is, well, you should. His writing is funnier than just about anyone’s and now he has a podcast that is excellent. I say Hooray for Mike Sacks and everything he stands for.” -David Sedaris
“He’s the best kind of comedy writer; a bona fide weirdo with virtually no interest in satisfying anything other than his own personal obsessions.” - Andy Richter
“ Randy is a hilariously, unexpectedly poignant and eminently worthy addition to Sacks’ sociological/anthropological exploration of the American Jackass and his curious ways. Audacious and inspired.” -Nathan Rabin
“The year's best memoir is about a man who shot a porno in a Baskin-Robbins.” - Vice
“ Randy does more to explain certain unexpected turns in this nation's political fate over the last couple of years than a bazillion think-pieces in the New York Times, Atlantic, New Yorker, MSNBC .” - John Colapinto ( The New Yorker )
“As the book’s description alludes, Randy is an experiment in memoir, biography, and, well, sheer insanity.” - Robobutt
Randy: The Full and Complete Unedited Biography and Memoir of the Amazing Life and Times of Randy S.! Reviews
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about 2mos into covid there was an applebee's commercial featuring the "welcome back kotter" theme song. randy is that commercial. randy is a coal-powered drone ordered off amazon. randy is a 1-star review of a CVS on their facebook page that calls out the cashier by name. randy is that line from the LFO song about how chinese food makes them sick. randy dances in gaithersburg and potomac and he is a great favorite. he never sleeps, randy. he is dancing, dancing.
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I think Mike Sacks hacked into the brain of my childhood friend. His main character Randy is what results when an overly confident nitwit inherits a lot of money and feels empowered to live to the height of his asshole nature. Mike Sacks unveils the character's vulnerability and foibles with a light hand and not once does it feel overly done. It is one of the rare books I'll read twice; the phrasing and word choice alone would give plenty to study. As someone who does characters, I found the book a great character exploration, one of those that increasingly reveals itself the more you study it.
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I don't know about this one, not really. I think it's all going to depend on how much you buy into the conceit and maybe even how many Randys you know and/or if you remember the internet of the late 90s/early 2000s.
Mike Sacks allegedly found this self-published memoir at a yard sale and it was so gloriously self aggrandizing that he had to get it bigger coverage. Randy S_____, the author, agreed, and the book was sold and published, unedited. I am not going to investigate this further, because I like this conceit quite a bit, and for about 60% of the book, I believed that it could actually be real.
The bits that feel real actually feel too real to have been made up. I think living where I do, in a west coast metropolitan area, has limited my exposure to the Randys of the world, but Randy sitting in the American Girl Doll store, pretending to love his doll and buy her clothes so he can eat at their restaurant (which has the best chicken strips) feels far too niche, maybe far too embarrassing, to be made up.
The actual author, the guy writing the memoir, is Noah B____, an aspiring writer who is getting paid to live with Randy for a year. The writing documents this year, but there are these bits at the end of each chapter that are far too positive, too glowing, to be Noah's unedited opinion. Clearly he's either writing what Randy tells him to or he knows Randy will be reading, so he alters any description to be relentlessly positive. According to Randy (and therefore Noah, who knows Randy will want to only read positive things about him), everyone loves him and adores him and admires him. He is a golden god, but much to humble to say that out loud.
It's kind of wild to actually read these words like they are real, not because they ring false, but because of the opposite.
Now, that remaining 40%, the bits that don't really feel real, those feel like they are trying too hard to be Randy. Where Randy at the American Girl Doll store feels like it couldn't possibly be made up, these bits feel like the opposite. They feel like the stuff I used to find on the internet back in college, homemade websites where clever writers would exaggerate to make good jokes about Goodwill finds or encounters they had yesterday. The point of these sites were to allow a person a platform to be funny on, but it was free and it was fun to watch someone grow as a writer.
Here, unfortunately, these bits were deflating because they were part of a larger bit, a bit I paid money for on a whim (the first new book I've bought in awhile, because I picked it up and flipped through it on multiple visits to the blue room, where it sat on an endcap). It's a little deflating because it felt like too much in a story that, around those bumps, felt real enough to work.
And most of it does work! It made me laugh enough, and while I hope it's true, I also kind of hope it isn't.
