Michelle Dsouza
Read This to Look Cool
Maeve Dunigan has spent a lifetime trying to seem effortlessly chill. This book is the evidence that it hasn't worked, and it is funnier for it.
Read This to Look Cool is a humor essay collection in the McSweeney's tradition: specific, self-aware, deadpan, and very online in its sensibility. The pieces are standalone, which means you can read one on a lunch break and put it down without losing a thread. That structural looseness is either a feature or a limitation depending on your patience for collections that don't build toward anything. I found it freeing.
The wit is consistent across the whole collection, which matters more than it sounds. Most humor essay collections peak in the first third and spend the rest coasting on goodwill. Dunigan doesn't let that happen. The register stays level: self-deprecating without being a performance of self-deprecation, absurdist without losing the emotional core underneath.
"Email Signatures in Ascending Order of How Nervous I Am to Be Emailing You" is the standout piece. It's a stream of consciousness that a lot of people have lived through and thought about writing down and never did. Dunigan wrote it down and made it funny without defusing it. You laugh because it's true.
She also hates tomatoes. She at least tried to like them, which puts her ahead of me.
Dunigan is likeable in a way that makes the humor land warmer than it might otherwise. She writes about belonging, self-performance, the anxiety of modern visibility, and the specific embarrassments that live rent-free in your head for years. She is not trying to be cool, which is the only way to write a book called Read This to Look Cool without it backfiring.
This is not my usual reading territory. Dunigan made it easy to be in anyway.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.
Maeve Dunigan has spent a lifetime trying to seem effortlessly chill. This book is the evidence that it hasn't worked, and it is funnier for it.
Read This to Look Cool is a humor essay collection in the McSweeney's tradition: specific, self-aware, deadpan, and very online in its sensibility. The pieces are standalone, which means you can read one on a lunch break and put it down without losing a thread. That structural looseness is either a feature or a limitation depending on your patience for collections that don't build toward anything. I found it freeing.
The wit is consistent across the whole collection, which matters more than it sounds. Most humor essay collections peak in the first third and spend the rest coasting on goodwill. Dunigan doesn't let that happen. The register stays level: self-deprecating without being a performance of self-deprecation, absurdist without losing the emotional core underneath.
"Email Signatures in Ascending Order of How Nervous I Am to Be Emailing You" is the standout piece. It's a stream of consciousness that a lot of people have lived through and thought about writing down and never did. Dunigan wrote it down and made it funny without defusing it. You laugh because it's true.
She also hates tomatoes. She at least tried to like them, which puts her ahead of me.
Dunigan is likeable in a way that makes the humor land warmer than it might otherwise. She writes about belonging, self-performance, the anxiety of modern visibility, and the specific embarrassments that live rent-free in your head for years. She is not trying to be cool, which is the only way to write a book called Read This to Look Cool without it backfiring.
This is not my usual reading territory. Dunigan made it easy to be in anyway.
Originally posted at www.instagram.com.