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NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today • From the creator of Elle’s “Eric Reads the News,” a heartfelt and hilarious memoir-in-essays about growing up seeing the world differently, finding unexpected hope, and experiencing every awkward, extraordinary stumble along the way. “Pop culture–obsessed, Sedaris-level laugh-out-loud funny . . . [R. Eric Thomas] is one of my favorite writers.”—Lin-Manuel Miranda, Entertainment Weekly FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TEEN VOGUE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Marie Claire • Men’s Health R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went—whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city—he found himself on the outside looking in. In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an “other” through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents’ house was an anomalous bright spot, and the Eden-like school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election for Elle online, and the seismic changes that came thereafter. Ultimately, Thomas seeks the answer to these ever more relevant questions: Is the future worth it? Why do we bother when everything seems to be getting worse? As the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways, Thomas finds the answers to these questions by reenvisioning what “normal” means and in the powerful alchemy that occurs when you at last place yourself at the center of your own story. Here for It will resonate deeply and joyfully with everyone who has ever felt pushed to the margins, struggled with self-acceptance, or wished to shine more brightly in a dark world. Stay here for it—the future may surprise you.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Read with Jenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today • From the creator of Elle’s “Eric Reads the News,” a heartfelt and hilarious memoir-in-essays about growing up seeing the world differently, finding unexpected hope, and experiencing every awkward, extraordinary stumble along the way. “Pop culture–obsessed, Sedaris-level laugh-out-loud funny . . . [R. Eric Thomas] is one of my favorite writers.”—Lin-Manuel Miranda, Entertainment Weekly FINALIST FOR THE LAMBDA LITERARY AWARD • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TEEN VOGUE AND ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • NPR • Marie Claire • Men’s Health R. Eric Thomas didn’t know he was different until the world told him so. Everywhere he went—whether it was his rich, mostly white, suburban high school, his conservative black church, or his Ivy League college in a big city—he found himself on the outside looking in. In essays by turns hysterical and heartfelt, Thomas reexamines what it means to be an “other” through the lens of his own life experience. He explores the two worlds of his childhood: the barren urban landscape where his parents’ house was an anomalous bright spot, and the Eden-like school they sent him to in white suburbia. He writes about struggling to reconcile his Christian identity with his sexuality, the exhaustion of code-switching in college, accidentally getting famous on the internet (for the wrong reason), and the surreal experience of covering the 2016 election for Elle online, and the seismic changes that came thereafter. Ultimately, Thomas seeks the answer to these ever more relevant questions: Is the future worth it? Why do we bother when everything seems to be getting worse? As the world continues to shift in unpredictable ways, Thomas finds the answers to these questions by reenvisioning what “normal” means and in the powerful alchemy that occurs when you at last place yourself at the center of your own story. Here for It will resonate deeply and joyfully with everyone who has ever felt pushed to the margins, struggled with self-acceptance, or wished to shine more brightly in a dark world. Stay here for it—the future may surprise you.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the cover
Chapter 1
The Audacity
I am awake because everything is hilarious. And also terrifying. And also embarrassing.
Don’t pick up the phone, I tell myself as I lie in bed on the first night of the Democratic National Convention, 2016. Go to sleep, my brain hisses, as I slip my hand out from beneath the sheet and unlock my phone. I open the Notes app and my bedroom is suddenly illuminated by garish, gray-blue light, like I’m in a reboot of Poltergeist. Well, I think to myself, it’s not like I have a choice now. I hitch myself up in bed and start to type. There is a joke emergency.
I don’t realize it at the time, but I am entering a season of sleepless nights. It’s the middle of July and I am three weeks into my new job as a person who contributes to this great democracy by making fun of politics online for money. It’s immensely enjoyable but it does have the strange side effect of forcing me to know more about what’s happening in the world, particularly in the political world, and as I said, that’s hilarious and terrifying and deeply embarrassing. So, perfect for the internet. I’ve never been a particularly internet-y person. I like a good meme like the rest of the youths, but I’m never on the cutting edge of internet culture. Though I’ve had a couple of lackluster blogs, I’ve never been a blogger. I read television recaps on the legendary site Television Without Pity for years but never commented or engaged in any meaningful way beyond wishing that they’d miraculously email me and ask me to join the team. I must admit I know what Tumblr is but every time I think I know how to search for something on it I am proven wrong. I am a consumer on the internet, a regular, a normal. And, suddenly, recently, a viral creator. Clearly, the internet is broken.
Four weeks earlier, I’d come across a photo of President Obama, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, and Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto grinning as they strode down a red-carpeted walkway in bespoke suits. I was immediately deeply shewk. So I told the internet about it. I fired up my aging computer, posted the shot on Facebook, and wrote, “Whoever took this photo deserves a GD Pulitzer Prize. We may be two minutes from doomsday but thank the Lord we still live in a universe where three world leaders can strut into a room like they’re the new interracial male cast of Sex and the City. Like I have ALREADY pre-purchased tickets to this film. Out here in these streets looking like Career Day Ken. Looking like Destiny’s DILF. Looking like the Alternate Universe version of our Current Political Universe. Looking like Tom Ford presents The Avengers.” It went on like that for a while. As I said, I was deeply shewk.
At this time, I had about 1,500 Facebook friends, almost exclusively people I’d actually met. I had, on occasion, posted something funny online that friends shared with their friends who shared with their friends, eventually giving whatever I’d written a temporary social lift. That’s how the internet works, and the first time it happened on Facebook—when my blog post about how expensive Beyoncé concert tickets were got 100,000 page views—I thought I was famous. The internet will quickly remind you that you are not famous; you just did this one thing this one time and that was yesterday so why are we still talking about it?
The world leaders photo was different, though. My crazed-thirst rant about the president and his hot friends zigzagged across the internet with a speed that shocked me. It was liked 77,000 times, generated...
About the Author-
R. Eric Thomas is a bestselling author, playwright, and screenwriter. His books include Here for It: Or, How to Save Your Soul in America, which was featured as a Read with Jenna Book Club Pick on NBC’s Today, and Reclaiming Her Time: The Power of Maxine Waters, co-authored with Helena Andrews-Dyer. For four years, he wrote “Eric Reads the News,” a wildly popular daily humor column covering pop culture and politics for Elle online. Eric is the winner of the Barrymore Award for Best New Play and the Dramatist Guild Lanford Wilson Award, and was a finalist for the Steinberg/ATCA New Play Award. He has written for the Peabody Award–winning streaming series Dickinson and Better Things on FX. Off the page, Eric is also the long-running host of The Moth StorySlams in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., and has been heard multiple times on The Moth Radio Hour, NPR’s All Things Considered, and It's Been A Minute with Sam Sanders. He lives in Maryland with his extraordinary husband, the Reverend David Norse Thomas.
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Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
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