The short version of this review is simple: drop everything, and order a copy of the new memoir, Joey Somebody: The Life and Times of a Recovering Douchebag. Then read it as soon as you can. You won’t regret doing so.
Here’s the longer version: Usually when I’m reviewing a book I try to be objective, or at least to have the appearance of objectivity. Sure, I’ll slip in a “Full Disclosure, the writer is a friend of mine” if I know the author.
I’m not doing that this time because I’ve been lucky enough to watch Joey’s journey in real life, which you now get to experience yourself in book form.
I don’t want to spoil any of the stories he tells, so instead I’ll share a bonus story that, I hope, will convey some of what makes Joey Dumont a memoirist worthy of your attention.
Today, if you asked me for one word to describe Joey, I’d probably say “mensch,” the Yiddish word for a standup guy, devoted husband and father, coach for his sons’ various athletic teams.
That wasn’t the word that would have popped to mind when I sat down next to him at an industry dinner in fall of 2004 in Utah. It was my first such dinner in a new industry, digital marketing.
Joey was, in other words, my baseline for what people in digital marketing are like.
And what a baseline he was. At that dinner, Joey was dressed to make an impression: tight-fitting jeans, black nail polish, a vest over a nice shirt. Some of his mannerisms were queeny, but he was assertively heterosexual. He was also scintillating, insightful, a charisma machine… the clearest evidence of which is that I don’t remember anybody else who was at our table that night.
It didn’t take me long to realize that nobody else in the industry was like Joey Dumont. My baseline was skewed.
But I wouldn’t have called Joey a douchebag. If pressed, “hyperactive peacock” might have come to mind.
In other words, if Joey’s journey is one of recovery from being a douchebag, I entered the story in medias res.
Reading his book, I got to go back to the beginning and see how it all came to be. I couldn’t put it down.
There are two remarkable things about Joey’s memoir, which, as I’ve already said, you should buy and read immediately.
First, his honesty is bracing. He talks about his life, his mistakes, how he dealt with them, how he failed to deal with them, in fascinating, insightful, and evocative detail.
Here’s how Joey describes an early bout with depression:
The effect was like that on a patient shot with Novocain whose insensitivity endangers the end of his tongue. I learned that mental dissonance at this level alters your ability to make even the easiest of decisions. Action requires a reference point, a beginning. And if nothing matters, there are no distinctions or priorities and therefore there is no capacity to align thoughts, feelings, words, and actions. I found myself staring at the wall for hours on end. Mad at the sun. Absent was my former confidence in my ability to distinguish A and B; it was replaced by hesitancy, paralysis, and confusion. I couldn’t focus if I was on fire.
This passage combines simile (Novocain), a thoughtful consideration of the aesthetics of depression, its consequences (paralysis), and a lyrical interjection: “mad at the sun.” Wow.
In 2004, if you’d told me I’d one day highlight this passage in a book written by the wild man sitting next to me, I would have laughed. Only a few months later, having slowly gotten to know the guy behind the persona, I think my eyebrows would have raised… but it would have been with interest rather than skepticism.
The second remarkable thing about Joey’s memoir is that‑-although it is the story of his journey from douchebaggery to menschdom–it is not a story in which he rejectshis former douchebag self. So many stories that authors tell of their wayward pasts are stories of retroactive repulsion, of regret. There’s an implicit and sometimes explicit wish embedded in these narratives that if the author only had it to do over again she or he would make different choices.
That’s not the case with Joey Somebody.
Joey understands that without his journey, he wouldn’t have reached his destination, and he’s happy with his destination. There’s a clear-sightedness to this memoir that I admire, one that I hope to emulate as I ruminate about my own life.
Read the book so that you can tag along with Joey on his journey.
Leave a Reply