People Are Unappealing: Even Me [Paperback]

Born the child of a homo and a hypochondriac (Okay, okay. Her dad’s not really a homosexual. He just acts like it. Her mom, however, really is a hypochondriac), Sara Barron never stood a chance of being normal. At age eleven, she starts writing porn (“He humped me wildly with his wiener”). At twelve, she gets mistaken for a trannie. The pre-op sort, no less. By seventeen, she's featured on the Jerry Springer Show. And that’s all before she hits New York.

People Are Unappealing tells the strange, funny, and sometimes filthy stories of Sara Barron’s twisted suburban upbringing and deranged attempt at taking the Big Apple by storm–first as an actor (then a waiter), then a dancer (then a waiter), then a comic (then a waiter). It’s there that she meets the ex-boyfriend turned street clown. The silk pajama-clad poet. The OCD Xanax addict who refuses to have sex wearing any fewer than three condoms.

Barron has a knack for attracting the unattractive. People Are Unappealing is her wickedly funny look at the dark side of humanity.“These days, the market is pretty well saturated when it comes to memoir. Which means it has to be good; it has to be different. Sara Barron's essays about her childhood, her parents, her life in acting school in Manhattan and her fellow actors are, dare we say it, as funny as David Sedaris'. . . . Barron swats these quirks around like a cat with a big, juicy catnip toy. When you aren't squirming, you're laughing out loud.”
—Los Angeles Times

“[W]hat happens to a bildungsroman in the Craigslist age. It follows the author on a mad-as-hell/not-taking-it-anymore complaining spree through the dregs of thankless, low-wage jobs. Along the way, Barron makes several keen observations about the strange things people do, and alsol�