Uncut

“I Don’t Care About Your Band” is a boring book, with a great title. I read this mockery of a memoir with the same intentions I have when reading every memoir. Which is to learn from other examples of my craft, also to relate and find entertainment in the narrative.

I assumed I would be especially charmed by this one, as it poised itself as a tell-all of groupie dating life of which I have often been accused. Not to mention Julie Klausner is a New York comedian, so her life had to at least be funny right? The book was also supposed to be full of sexual misadventures, like a rip-off of my favorite Chelsea Handler, minus all the drugs and alcohol.

I came to find very soon that Julie Klausner was not funny, at least not on paper. Her book also had very little to do with actual bands, and was more a collection of her awkward moments, which were really more pathetic than humorous. Sure I had a chuckle here and there, mostly about the snowballing vegan who liked to slurp his own semen. However may I say, if that is the highlight of a book about your life, sister you need a new life. There were some similarities I could relate to, a mutual distaste for Williamsburg and a knack for finding useless men, but at least strum your pain in an entertaining way will you? Or else what is the point of making a book to embarrass yourself with?

Aside from a few easy laughs and familiar experiences this woman’s life was pretty bland. Sure she slept with a bunch of guys, got bed bugs and herpes, but that’s all? This novel both failed to make me laugh and moreover failed to make me think, which all memoirs ultimately should. This woman had done less in thirty years than I have in the past ten. Julie Klausner had accomplished one thing with her book, it made me want to surpass her.

I’m not knocking the girl for trying, I mean it is quite a feat to be a relative nobody and have a memoir published, even widely read, but do we really have to set the bar that low?

I knew upon reading this sad excuse for a New York girl on the prowl that I could write a better one, and would do just that. It was like seeing a classmate get a good grade that they didn’t’ deserve, I knew I had to strive to produce something more interesting for people to read.

I am not going to write the kind of memoir that goes on all about the reckless days of youth, only to end by the writer stating they finally found some sort of sanity in a relationship. “I Don’t Care About Your Band” was like a bad romantic comedy in book form, though the content was neither comical nor romantic. Why do all the books and movies end once the lead character finds a partner? Who is to say this new person will not just become the next ex on the pile of those already written about and discarded?

I have many questions to explore in the cultivation of my own memoir, but one thing is for certain, I will not end it in this cliché and insulting a manner. As if I have divorced myself in favor of monogamy. Sure one day I may welcome a man into my life that isn’t a disastrous mistake, but I will not lose the part of myself who made them. Contrary to popular belief life doesn’t end when a serious relationship begins, or at least it should not. So to Julie Klausner, author, and unfunny comedian, I just have to say that I Don’t Care About Your Book, and I hope your committed life is far more interesting than your days of frenzy.