The Choke Artist: Confessions of a Chronic Underachiever [Paperback]

In this hilarious collection of essays, David Yoo exposes the pain--and the absurdities--of coming of age when you're awkward, insecure, and unable to stop shooting yourself in the foot.

In often cringe-inducing episodes, David Yoo perfectly captures the cycle of failure and fear from childhood through adulthood with brutal honesty Whether he's wearing four layers of clothing to artificially beef up his slim frame, routinely testing highlighters against his forearm to see if he indeed has yellow skin, or preemptively sabotaging promising relationships to avoid being compared to former boyfriends, Yoo celebrates and skewers the insecurities of anxious people everywhere. THE CHOKE ARTIST is brilliantly sneaky. David Yoo is so funny that sometimes you forget he's writing about his (and America's) deepest, most basic fears. In a country that worships success, failure is taboo. Yoo embraces it head-on, his humor leavening yet never concealing the pain of not having enough faith in oneself. Stewart O'Nan, author of Emily, Alone and The OddsI loved this book and couldn't put it down! It's raw, startling, laugh-out-loud funny-and ultimately about the irrepressible human spirit.Amy Chua, Yale Law Professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother An admitted rug-humping, shrimpy, underachieving choke artist, David Yoo confesses his deepest darkest, hilariously unattractive and sadly relatable truths. And in turn, sets us alA