debtFrom Tina Fey’s Bossypants to Samantha Irby’s We Are Never Meeting in Real Life, contemporary America has a rich tradition of essay-style narrative nonfiction by women. These books typically walk the line between autobiography, cultural analysis, and “self-deprecating descriptions of my dating life and work.” Their success — and entertaining — rests primarily on the voice. Does this description of yourself sound plausible? Or are you exaggerating for effect? Do they sound like real people, despite (as always) their near-celebrity? Are they trying too hard on the self-deprecation?
By this standard, Desiree Akhavan’s You’re Embarrassing Yourself is an easy success, whether you’re familiar with her work or not. She’s the director of the HBO Max series Hacks and Hulu’s Tiny Beautiful Things, and has also produced her own films, including Appropriate Behavior and The Miseducation of Cameron Post. Akhavan is that rare breed of person who is both painfully honest and likable. Not that you have to be a likable person in your autobiography or in real life, but it’s hard to read a book with an annoying character or a hypocrite.
Smartly written and funny, Akhavan describes how he spent the first 40 years of his life trying to build self-confidence: falling in love, getting his heart broken, slowly becoming accustomed to identifying as gay and bisexual at times, realizing that you can be successful professionally without feeling self-conscious, and finally, realizing that you don’t need to be “successful” at anything — love, work, life, family — to be a decent person. You just need to get by.
In the first half, Akhavan captures her intense adolescent aversion to friendship and dating, which she sees as the “pre-swan” phase. In the second half, at age 30, she experiences the life she’s always wanted, when her film Appropriate Behavior comes out and becomes a hit. She’s no longer a loser, no longer humiliated most of the time, and she’s forced to admit that maybe she’s not so bad after all.
But despite the light-hearted humor, it’s clear to the reader that the real reason she’s felt awkward for so long has nothing to do with her supposed flaws in appearance or personality. Though born in New York in 1984, Akhavan feels like an immigrant, and is treated as such. The second half of the book describes her parents’ flight from Iran in 1980, recounting fragments of the life they left behind. She learns to “be American” by watching TV; her parents worked all day to earn money to give her and her brother the most expensive education they could get. She cites this as the reason she became a filmmaker. (“For a long time, we just sat in front of the TV in silence.”)
Her career as a writer, actor, and director offers a solution to the problem of lack of belonging. If she can turn that lack of belonging into something others can celebrate and defend in film and television, she can make a virtue out of her outsider status. When her second film, The Miseducation of Cameron Post, won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2018, she half-jokingly called herself a “queer Iranian woman director.” But the success was bittersweet, and the sense of triumph was short-lived. She soon found the joy of the awards tainted by having to be typecast, or at least “in the game.”
In the afterglow of Sundance, Akhavan hates having to grumble as narcissistic Hollywood financiers pitch her films, and loathes her need for money and opportunity and recognition: “Hurry up and start trying to get work. He needs a Middle Eastern woman with some film experience, or it’ll seem racist, and there are only three of us.” The honesty of it all is addictive and endearing, offering a look inside a closed world and seeing it as fascinating and inspiring, terrifying and deeply disappointing.
“You’re Embarrassing Yourself” reminds me of Nora Ephron’s best work, in which she famously thought her neck was “bad” and that she “had no chest.” You believe Ephron’s insecurities, and enjoy exploring them, but at the same time, you know she doesn’t really mean it. She’s just making it clear how foolish we all are in our self-obsession. Akhavan channels this sentiment and takes it a step further into self-awareness, without ever losing any of the comedic value of delving into one’s neuroses. Her ultimate realization is a kind of self-acceptance, an admission that while she does things she’s ashamed of (and I think she actually means self-destructive), she doesn’t need to be ashamed of them. Basically, we’re all embarrassing, but this isn’t something to be ashamed of.
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