Attempting Normal
Marc Maron
Language: English
Pages: 240
ISBN: 0812982789
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
NATIONAL BESTSELLER
Marc Maron is “a master of spinning humor out of anguish” (Bookforum), even when that anguish is pretty clearly self-inflicted. In Attempting Normal, he threads together twenty-five stories from his life and near-death, from his first comedy road trips (with a fugitive junkie comic with a missing tooth) to his love affair with feral animals (his cat rescues are bloody epics) to his surprisingly moving tales of lust, heartbreak, and hope. The stories are united by Maron’s thrilling storytelling style—intensely smart, disarmingly honest, and explosively funny. Together, they add up to a hilarious and moving tale of failing, flailing, and finding a way.
Praise for Attempting Normal
“I laughed so hard reading this book.”—David Sedaris
“Funny . . . surprisingly deep . . . laced with revelatory insights.”—Los Angeles Times
“Superb . . . A reason that [it] is a superior example of an overcrowded genre—the comedian memoir—is Mr. Maron’s hardheaded approach to his history, the wisdom of experience.”—The New York Times
“Marc Maron is a legend because he is both a great comic and a brilliant mind. Attempting Normal is a deep, hilarious megashot of feeling and truth as only this man can administer.”—Sam Lipsyte
Praise for Marc Maron and WTF
“The stuff of comedy legend.”—Rolling Stone
“Marc Maron is a startlingly honest, compelling, and hilarious comedian-poet. Truly one of the greatest of all time.”—Louis C.K.
“I’ve known Marc for years and I can tell you first hand that he’s passionate, fearless, honest, self-absorbed, neurotic, and screamingly funny.”—David Cross
“Revered among his peers . . . raw and unflinchingly honest.”—Entertainment Weekly
“Devastatingly funny.”—Los Angeles Times
“For a comedy nerd, this show is nirvana.”—Judd Apatow
I Used to Say My Mother Was Shirley Bassey
Doctor at Large (Doctor Series, Book 3)
I Like You Just the Way I Am: Stories About Me and Some Other People
unleashed and demystified by things like pornography and Viagra, but I don’t think this was Wilhelm Reich’s vision of what would happen if repression were destroyed. Sexual freedom has not obliterated neurosis. There are just a whole lot of new neuroses and issues that come from completely untethered sex. Repression might now be the healthier choice—when you deny yourself easy sex, you allow sex to retain its function as a vehicle for intimacy and love as opposed to some kind of athletic pastime
realize it’s you. You’re the guy. This is real life. Feel it. 14 I’m a Good Person I have moments where I literally ask myself, “Am I a good person? Really? Am I?” Then I think, “Well, if I am a good person would I be asking myself that question? Don’t good people know that they are good people? If I have time to ruminate, make a list in my head of examples of my bad-personness, then maybe I’m not a good person. I’m not saying that I am a bad person, but why would I question myself?”
this time putting together these feeders. All this time being about a half hour. I did some research. Hummingbird feed is just tap water and sugar, a quarter cup of sugar to a cup of water. You have to use tap water for the minerals. You create the mixture and fill up the feeders. The red liquid stuff they sell at pet stores is just a racket. So I built the feeders, mixed the feed, filled them up, and put them out. Sure enough, the little fast-flying fuckers came. They are fascinating. I’ve
three-hundred-pound man standing in front of the place wearing a tank top, smoking a cigar, and packing a sidearm. There were a few black people hanging out in front of the place. It felt like a wall of you don’t belong here. Maybe I was projecting that. Maybe that was a wall I was creating. I just felt like an intruder, a tourist, an outsider that they put up with because the place is famous. I was nervous. When I walked in, it was clearly a pretty beat-up joint. There were about five booths
something, that the simple fact that I made it through the show meant I was victorious. But the war wasn’t over yet: The next battle was in the car, the war I waged on myself. I’m not funny enough, that joke didn’t work, why can’t I stop sweating, fuck those people, I need more jokes, where the fuck am I, shit I don’t have a map. I’ll never forget the electricity of postperformance elation and self-flagellation, flying through the New England countryside at night in a VW Golf. Not romantic. But