Davy Rothbart is looking for love in all the wrong places. Constantly. He falls helplessly in love with pretty much every girl he meets—and rarely is the feeling reciprocated. Time after time, he hops in a car and tears across half of America with his heart on his sleeve. He’s continually coming up with outrageous schemes, which he always manages to pull off. Well, almost always. But even when things don’t work out, Rothbart finds meaning and humor in every moment. Whether it’s humiliating a scammer who takes money from aspiring writers or playing harmless (but side-splitting) goofs on his deaf mother, nothing and no one is off-limits.
But as much as Rothbart is a tragically lovable, irresistibly brokenhearted hero, it’s his prose that’s the star of the book. In the tradition of David Sedaris and Sloane Crosley but going places very much his own, his essays show how things that are seemingly so wrong can be so, so right.
About Davy Rothbart
Davy Rothbart is a frequent contributor to This American Life and a variety of magazines, the founder of Found Magazine and the editor of its various bestselling anthologies, and the author of The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas. He was born and raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he still lives.
Editorial Review
Rothbart (The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, 2005) is the creator of the fanzine Found Magazine, which features the provocative and poignant notes people leave in coffee shops and on sidewalks. On the evidence of these pieces, his life is similarly haphazard. In “Shade,” his pining for a woman who resembles a beloved movie character leads him to a long-distance relationship and a disastrous road trip. In “Tarantula,” a one-night stand ends with him in a swimming pool with a dead body. And in “What Are You Wearing?” a random caller becomes a regular phone-sex partner. In small doses, Rothbart’s say-yes-to-anything attitude and self-deprecating tone is entertaining and engaging. The best piece, “99 Bottles of Pee on the Wall,” tracks his obsession with a scam artist who runs a series of fraudulent literary contests; the slow burn of his outrage—and growing crush on a female author who got taken—is smartly paced, and he’s candid about his quixotic pursuit. But taken together, there’s an overall pattern to his responses that gives these essays an off-putting, manipulative aspect. Rothbart’s proclaimed modesty actually comes packaged in loads of hyperbole—every girl he falls for is the most beautiful girl in the room, every night was the most amazing night ever, every dumb drunken thing was the dumbest, most drunken thing he could have done. Such posturing makes the poignant tone of “New York, New York,” about a bus trip he took right after 9/11, feel engineered for emotional effect. And it makes a more serious work of reportage about a man he claims was wrongly convicted for murder less convincing than it should be. – Kirkus Reviews
Review: Davy Rothbart tells it true in ‘My Heart Is an Idiot’
The Chicago Tribune Book Review – September 16, 2012 (Excerpt)
The love of Davy Rothbart’s life is a character from Allison Anders’ 1992 film “Gas Food Lodging.” Shade, played by Fairuza Balk, is the wan and ephemerally beautiful daughter of a New Mexico trailer park waitress. From the day Rothbart — the editor of Found magazine and a “This American Life” favorite — first saw the film, he’s fallen only for women with slivers of Shade to them: wraithlike girls who are often more fiction than fact.
“In the weeks and months that followed, my desire for her dominated my being…. It’s been seventeen years since I came out of that theater, and I still compare every girl I meet to Shade,” he writes in “Shade,” one of the centerpiece stories in his memoir-heavy essay collection “My Heart Is an Idiot.” [Read the full article...]
On the Road, a Poet of Lost and Found
The New York Times Book Review – September 19, 2012 (Excerpt)
NEW HAVEN — Davy Rothbart had misplaced his usual hype music, so Rage Against the Machine would have to do. Mr. Rothbart, a writer and a creator of Found magazine, the repository for forgotten notes and photos, normally listened to Metallica’s “One” to get himself pumped for a show. But on Monday evening he popped a CD with “Bombtrack” into the player in his rented Dodge minivan and began fist-pumping along.
He was amping himself up for a library stop on the tour celebrating the 10th anniversary of Found, at which he would also read from “My Heart Is an Idiot,” his unfiltered new memoir. Outside the parked car, he changed from one basketball jersey to another, deodorizing himself with a spray of body mist — a road shower, he called it — before sitting in the driver’s seat and swigging from a bottle of rye whiskey. He opened a thrift-store briefcase to go through an assemblage of discarded to-do lists, receipts and love letters that he would read at the show, like this one: “Dear Ron, I love you, but things have not been the same since we found out we were related.”
Paul Kirk is a librarian and one of his town’s quirkier residents. In a childhood home lacking parents (his mother dying of MS and his father an alcoholic) Paul had imagined himself a member of the neighboring family. Now in his late twenties, Paul vicariously participates in the households of his community. His peeping-Tom proclivities express his awkward need for social bonding. [Read more...]
We are the only country that makes guns, including military-style assault weapons, available to anyone who wants to buy them. This is not freedom. It is a tyranny of death and destruction — a tyranny of which the National Rifle Association is proud. The Washington Post
BOILED PEANUTS
