You're Embarrassing Yourself: Stories of Love, Lust, and Movies

by Desiree Akhavan

Overview

Writer, actor, and director Desiree Akhavan shares the stories she was told to shut up about—hilarious, horny, heartbreaking tales of a life in pursuit of art, love, and a better haircut.

“Hilariously raw, relatable, and—dare I even say—sexy.”—Jessi Klein

When it comes to shame, Desiree Akhavan knows what she’s talking about—whether it’s winning the title of the Ugliest Girl at her high school, acquiescing to the nose job she was lovingly forced into by her Iranian parents, or losing her virginity to a cokehead she met in a support group for cutters. In You’re Embarrassing Yourself, Akhavan goes to the rawest places—the lifelong struggle to be at peace in one’s body, the search for home as the child of immigrants, the anxious underbelly of artistic ambition—in pursuit of wisdom, catharsis, and lolz.

Equal parts funny and heartfelt, these seventeen essays chart an artist’s journey from outcast to overnight indie darling, to (somewhat) self-aware adult woman. The result is a collection that captures the pathetic lows and euphoric highs of our youth—and how to survive them.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780399588501
Publisher:	Random House Publishing Group
Publication date:	08/13/2024
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	483,609
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Desiree Akhavan is a filmmaker, writer, and (an occasional) actor. She created the Hulu original series The Bisexual as well as the films Appropriate Behavior and The Miseducation of Cameron Post, which won the Sundance Grand Jury Prize. As an episodic director, she’s worked on numerous shows, including Hacks and Ramy. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian and British Vogue.

Read an Excerpt

The Beast

Remember Hot or Not? It was one of the most highly trafficked websites of the early aughts. The name pretty much says it all. People uploaded photos of themselves, and users would vote: hot or not. Back then, we had a huge Dell desktop that lived in my brother Ardavan’s room, and before I could even touch it I’d have to hassle my mom to get off the phone to free up the line. Then came the process of logging on to the internet, which had a soundscape that, to this day, elicits a Pavlovian response of making my heart race in anticipation. At the time, the very existence of the internet was surreal and a bit exhilarating. I chose to use my first precious hours with it doomscrolling HotorNot. I was there to train my eye, and as I did a pattern emerged: skinny symmetrical white girls in bikinis = hot, the rest of us = not.

When I was fourteen, someone created a website where you could vote for the hottest girl at my school. I went to an elite New York City private school that took itself so seriously that when you were asked where you went to school, you’d watch yourself stiffen with a pseudo-humble Maybe you’ve heard of it? People in New York knew about Horace Mann. It was both famous and infamous, and I couldn’t decide if I should be proud or horrified.

To explain why Horace Mann was what it was, I need to set the scene. New York City sells itself as a haven for weirdos: inclusive and radical. It’s not. You have to be a certain kind of hot, rich, and successful to play—the rest of us are just extras. It’s a city built on hierarchies with a small town’s penchant for gossip. People make the pilgrimage to New York because they believe, deep in their bones, that they might be the very best at something. In turn, the city remains in a constant state of flux, perpetually measuring exactly who and what is “the best.” There’s always a best neighborhood, a best handbag, a best restaurant, a best play, and so of course the schools were measured up against one another and it was agreed by many that Horace Mann was the best of the best. Or at least that’s what our parents told themselves to justify the exorbitant tuition fees.

The students didn’t just live on Park Avenue; they lived in penthouses on Park Avenue, where the elevator doors open up into the living room. Many parents fell into the category of “New York famous,” which means profiled in the Times, but nobody outside the Citarella delivery zone has ever heard of you. Renée Fleming famous. It was shockingly overpriced, shockingly elite, shocking for about forty-seven other reasons, like the molestation of teen boys by an Austrian choir conductor who’d strut through the halls like he was Mick Jagger.

My parents put every cent they had into sending my brother and me to the best. They even took out a third mortgage on their house to make it happen. Having moved to America from Iran not knowing much about the country, the people, or the rules, they were confident that the strongest advantage they could offer was to send us to the same school as the children of the richest and most powerful, so we could mingle with them and then morph into exemplary American versions of ourselves. It’s a strategy that worked for my brother, Ardavan, who was academically gifted and disciplined. I don’t know if he mingled with the spawn of the New York elite socially, but he definitely excelled among them and adopted a sense of rigid perfection that continues to elude me. From Horace Mann he went on to Columbia University, then the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine, and is currently one of the country’s leading pediatric urological surgeons.

I was never sure if I’d be able to return on that investment. For me, unlike my brother, Horace Mann didn’t make sense. It was a place for future investment bankers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and trophy wives. Your currency lay in being the richest, the smartest, and (duh) the hottest, which of course is true of every school, but we were all high off our own farts, so of course we would go and make our own version of HotorNot.

I say “we,” but I shouldn’t. It wasn’t just that I didn’t belong. “Not belonging” is too passive. You can not belong and still function in a place. I was a different species from the rest of them. At fourteen, I had exactly one friend: Nina Klein, a high-strung, straight-A parent pleaser and competitive gymnast who taught me that grapes have ten calories apiece. Every day we’d eat lunch in the girls’ locker room so we’d be early for gym. You know, the way cool kids do.

I knew I wouldn’t be on the Hottest Girls at Horace Mann website, but that didn’t stop me from checking it every time I was within twenty feet of a computer. Knowing you’re not part of the conversation doesn’t stop you from wanting to eavesdrop and then mold yourself in the image of those who are, obsessing over every detail of their face, body, and wardrobe, scanning to see what you can copy in the hope of dragging yourself a little closer to the heart of it. I felt compelled to track who was winning the Hottest Girls at Horace Mann as if it were the presidential primary.

One day I got an email from an address I didn’t recognize. Inside was a link and nothing else. The link led me to a site with the header “The Ugliest Girls at Horace Mann.” The layout was exactly like its sister site, only next to the names were adorable nicknames like “the Slut,” “the Bitch,” “Butterface.” Most of the girls listed were actually pretty popular and conventionally hot, so I got the sense the site was an inside joke made to settle a vendetta. But then I saw my own name. Next to it, “the Beast.”

I knew I was going to be on that site the minute I saw “Ugliest.” I knew it instinctively, the way I knew liver would taste mealy, like an overripe tomato, before it ever touched my tongue. My name earned a whopping forty-two votes, while the others had two or three each. There’s no way the creators had a vendetta to settle with me. Eating lunch alone with Nina Klein in the girls’ locker room meant sidestepping vendettas. It was undeniable: I was the only person on the list who’d made it there because she was legitimately ugly. Not a bitch; a beast.

You know when something bad happens, worse than your worst nightmare, and the pure drama of it fills you with a weird sense of satisfaction? Satisfaction laced in endorphins. There was something almost euphoric about the sheer intensity of seeing my name on that website.

I felt starstruck, knowing I was watching a seminal life moment take shape before my eyes, as I refreshed the page every thirty seconds to watch my votes go up. Starstruck plus nostalgic for the life I’d been living an hour earlier, before I’d gotten the email. I’d always had a suspicion, but now I had empirical proof: I was the Ugliest.

I’d started to get the sense I might be ugly around eleven, when adults began offering up unsolicited hair, diet, exercise, and plastic surgery advice. It was about that time that I learned what “hot” was, and how it seemed to be the price of admission if you were a girl. Any woman who didn’t classify as hot was automatically relegated to being the butt of the joke. Or at least that’s what I’d gleaned from Howard Stern, who spoke on the matter for ninety minutes straight each morning, blasting through the bus speakers on the way to school.

But it wasn’t just Howard; it’s in my blood. Iranians are spectacularly superficial. Presentation is everything. We subscribe to a “more is more” aesthetic: full face of makeup to go to the grocery store. We’re serving baroque, air-kisses on both cheeks, grass-is-greener-on-my-side realness. You can’t drive home from a party without going through a full breakdown of who got fat and who got old, like Mom and Dad are Joan Rivers’s Fashion Police and you’re their backseat studio audience.

Editorial Reviews

06/17/2024

Actor and filmmaker Akhavan reflects on her heritage, her romantic disappointments, and her 1990s coming-of-age in this funny and incisive debut memoir-in-essays. The daughter of Iranian immigrants who sent Akhavan and her siblings to one of New York City’s most exclusive private schools, Akhavan knew early on she was a “different species” from her peers. At 14, her classmates nicknamed her the Beast and included her on a list of the school’s “ugliest girls,” a designation that haunted her into adulthood (“I was the Beast for so long that even once I crawled my way to something different, I couldn’t decide what I’d become without looking to strangers for answers”). The essays on Akhavan’s failed relationships have their charms—especially the one about her first heartbreak at a women’s college in Massachusetts, which brilliantly balances humor and pathos—but she’s at her most heartrending when she looks elsewhere, writing about her quest to feel at home in an immigrant community that struggles to accept her queerness, or cataloging how her best friend’s motherhood impinges upon their relationship. By the moving final entry, in which Akhavan surprises herself by realizing that she, too, wants to become a mother, she’s charted an endearingly crooked path to maturity. This is a winner. Agent: Kim Witherspoon, InkWell Management. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

With cackle-worthy humor and absolute ease, Desiree Akhavan shares her deeply honest stories of culture and identity, modern sexuality, and what it is to be an artist.”—Lena Dunham, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Not That Kind of Girl

“From Tina Fey’s Bossypants to Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, there is a rich modern American tradition of female essay-style narrative nonfiction. Their success—and their enjoyability—largely depends on the voice. . . . Akhavan is that rare thing: both painfully honest and likable.”—The Guardian
 
“Akhavan gets real. Like, really real. So real that if I’d experienced some of the stuff she speaks on in this memoir, I’d take it to my grave real.”—Book Riot

“Akhavan is one of the most audacious and important filmmakers working today. . . . She’s no stranger to mining her life for tragicomic gold, which she does aplenty in her memoir-in-essays.”—Electric Lit

“Desiree Akhavan’s memoir is a hilariously raw, relatable, and—dare I even say—sexy recounting of an awkward girl’s journey to finding her way as an adult, and ultimately, an artist. In other words—a perfect book.”—Jessi Klein, New York Times bestselling author of I’ll Show Myself Out

“Addictively honest, and cool without leaving anyone out, this book offers a hand and a laugh to readers who have gone through some of the same things that Desiree Akhavan did—which, let’s be honest, is most of us.”—Casey Wilson, New York Times-bestselling author of The Wreckage of My Presence

“An utterly charming, hilarious coming-of-art story, full to the brim with cringe and heart.”—Melissa Febos, national bestselling-author of Body Work and Girlhood

“Full of heart, thrumming with profundity, and laugh out loud hilarious, You're Embarrassing Yourself marks Desiree Akhavan as a blazing literary talent. Come for the gossip and cringe; stay for the moving portraits of familial loyalty, queerness, art making, and the many ways we find ourselves home.”—T. Kira Madden, author of Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls

“A moving account of self-acceptance that gives us each permission to take it all a little less seriously.”—Anna Sale, host of the podcast Death, Sex & Money and author of Let's Talk About Hard Things              

“[A] funny and incisive debut memoir-in-essays. . . . [Akhavan charts] an endearingly crooked path to maturity.”—Publishers Weekly

“Equal parts a growing-up survival guide and a confessional about never having grown up at all, this title is sure to captivate readers looking for a fresh and authentic voice.”—Booklist

“A readably funny and candid memoir.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the Publisher

2024-05-17
A Sundance-winning filmmaker reveals how her “most cringe-inducing moments” have been integral in shaping her life.

The New York City–born daughter of Iranian immigrants, Akhavan always felt like a “different species.” Her insecurities became even more pronounced during adolescence when classmates posted a picture of her on a joke website and labeled it “the Beast.” Later, the author would reclaim the differences that set her apart from “skinny symmetrical white girls” (broad shoulders, Middle Eastern background, queerness) on a journey to adulthood that was both darkly comic and sometimes self-destructive. In college, Akhavan began cutting, and soon after, she underwent cosmetic surgery. “I don’t think my nose job actually had that much to do with my nose,” she writes. “I was reeling from my first broken heart and my parents wanted to support me, but since my heart had been broken by a girl, we had to pretend it wasn’t happening.” In 2005, Akhavan met Cecilia. Their professional collaboration helped the author find success as an independent filmmaker, while their friendship survived the “desperate need for validation” that she had battled for years. When Cecilia had a baby, Akhavan realized, “the truth that was too embarrassing to say out loud was that I’d never have considered making a decision without her, from what outfit to wear to what partner to choose, while she hadn’t taken me into account when making the biggest deci­sion of her life.” Musing on the maturity that brought with it a desire for both children and “proximity to my heritage,” she notes, sagely, “you’re going to keep making a fool of yourself, because that’s what it is to be alive.” As she depicts her struggle to come to terms with a complex identity, Akhavan also celebrates the hard-won privilege of self-acceptance.

A readably funny and candid memoir.

Kirkus Reviews