Comedy « The Book Faery Reviews

14Feb/101

Everything Hurts, Bill Scheft – Author Guest Post

TITLE: Everything Hurts

AUTHOR: Bill Scheft

PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

PUBLICATION DATE: April 7, 2009

PAGES: 288

GENRE: Fiction, Political Humor

Phil Camp has a problem. Not the fact that he wrote a parody of a self-help book (Where Can I Stow My Baggage?) that the world took seriously and became an international bestseller. And not the fact that he wrote the book under a phony name, Marty Fleck, and the phony guy became a self-help guru overnight. Phil cannot be Marty Fleck. He can barely be himself.

No, Phil’s problem is he has been walking with a limp for nine months. Phil is in constant pain, yet there is nothing physically wrong with his body that would cause such agony. That problem leads him to the controversial Dr. Samuel Abrun, a real doctor who wrote a real self-help book (The Power of “Ow!”) that made thousands of people pain-free.

So, what happens when the self-help fraud, meets the genuine item? Does he get better? Can he hobble out of his own way to help himself? Most important, can the reader make it through 50 pages without thinking, “Wait a minute. Is that a twinge I feel in my lower back, or just gas?”

Phil embraces Abrun’s unorthodox psychogenic theories passionately, but manages to save some passion for Abrun's daughter, Janet, a doctor herself who has her own theories, and remedies, for chronic pain. If all this weren't enough, Phil tries to delve further into his past with his unconventional psychotherapist, The Irish Shrink, even if it means revealing dark secrets he never remembered telling him the first two or three times. And if all that weren’t enough, Phil confronts his alter ego’s nemesis, right-wing radio blowhard Jim McManus, only to find out they share a common enemy – the same family.

Like Carl Hiassen and Larry David, author Bill Scheft understands that the best humor is always excruciating. That fits the story of Everything Hurts, and its lesson: that pain is the ultimate teacher. By the end, Phil Camp, the self-proclaimed “self-help fraud” turns out to be the real thing. And the real thing turns out to be flawed, confused, but hopeful. In other words, human.

AUTHOR GUEST POST...In EVERYTHING HURTS, the main female character is Dr. Samuel Abrun's daughter, Janet Abrun-Fitzgerald. Abrun's original name in the book was Samuel Curto and his daughter was Janet Curto-Fitzgerald. The lawyers at Simon and Schuster made me change his name to Abrun because "Curto" was too close to John Sarno, the legendary mindbody doctor who inspired the character I created. When I was seeing Dr. Sarno for what I then thought was psychosomatic pain, I met a woman in one of his small discussion groups. She recognized me because her 14-year-old son read my column in Sports Illustrated, which had a very flattering drawing of me in the corner. I gave her a copy of my collection, THE BEST OF THE SHOW and I took down her email and sent her notices of my wife's (comedian Adrianne Tolsch) hilarious one-woman show on aging, "None of Your Damn Business," which she came to and loved. The woman's name was, and is, Hope Fitzgerald. So, when I started writing the book and wanted to come up with a name for Curto's daughter, I loved the sound of Janet Curto-Fitzgerald, and I liked the sound of Janet Abrun-Fitzgerald even more.

Still there? Good. Now, when I used to send emails out for Adrianne's shows, Yahoo Mail back then was not sophisticated enough to handle flyers in the body of the email. So I used MSN Mail and I had a whole address book of Adrianne's mailing list. Hope Fitzgerald was on that list.

One day a few months ago, somebody I hadn't seen in a while gets in my face about sending me an email I hadn't responded to. I said, "Where'd you send it?" He says the MSN address. I tell him I only use that for Adrianne's shows. This makes me think I better check that Inbox. I'm quick that way. Well, sure enough, there are like 50 emails. One from Hope Fitzgerald from last March, telling me she's coming to my event at the 92nd St. Y in May. I write back and apologize and give her the email address from my website. And I add, "If you've read the book, I hope you don't mind that I stole your last name for Janet."

She writes me back the next day. She says, "I assume you thought Hope is my first name. It is not. Hope is my middle name. My first name is Janet. I'm Janet Fitzgerald!"

There are no coincidences.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR...Novelist, columnist, television writer. During the last two decades, Bill Scheft has established himself as a versatile, singular and influential comedic voice.

A frequent creative presence on award shows, roasts and television specials, Scheft wrote for the 1995 and 2005 Academy Awards, was the head writer for three ESPY Awards and has contributed special material to the Emmys, Tonys and Grammys.

Over the last decade, Scheft has contributed humor essays and short pieces to the New Yorker, New York Times, Esquire, TV Guide, George, Talk, Slate, Modern Humorist, the collections Mirth of a Nation, 101 Damnations, May Contain Nuts, Howl, The Enlightened Bracketologist and a few other places that may or may not exist anymore.

Tagged as: Andy Borowitz, Bill Scheft, Comics, David Letterman, Everything Hurts, Humor, Literary, Mark Twain, Political Humor, Psychology, Rush Limbaugh, Self-Help 1 Comment

18Sep/0923

Supreme Courtship…Christopher Buckley: Book Giveaway

President of the United States Donald Vanderdamp is having a hell of a time getting his nominees appointed to the Supreme Court. After one nominee is rejected for insufficiently appreciating To Kill A Mockingbird, the president chooses someone so beloved by voters that the Senate won't have the guts to reject her -- Judge Pepper Cartwright, the star of the nation's most popular reality show, Courtroom Six.

Will Pepper, a straight-talking Texan, survive a confirmation battle in the Senate? Will becoming one of the most powerful women in the world ruin her love life? And even if she can make it to the Supreme Court, how will she get along with her eight highly skeptical colleagues, including a floundering Chief Justice who, after legalizing gay marriage, learns that his wife has left him for another woman.

Soon, Pepper finds herself in the middle of a constitutional crisis, a presidential reelection campaign that the president is determined to lose, and oral arguments of a romantic nature. Supreme Courtship is another classic Christopher Buckley comedy about the Washington institutions most deserving of ridicule. - FROM HACHETTE BOOKS

Listen to an Excerpt

ABOUT THE AUTHOR...Christopher Buckley is the author of eleven books, many of them national bestsellers, including The White House Mess, God Is My Broker, Little Green Men, and No Way to Treat a First Lady, which won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. He has published more than fifty comic essays in The New Yorker. In 2002, he received the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence. He is the editor of ForbesLife and lives in New York and Washington, D.C.

You can find Christopher Buckley also at the The Daily Beast.

FROM THE BOOK FAERY REVIEWS...Thanks to Hachette Books, The Book Faery Reviews is giving away THREE copies of Supreme Courtship by Christopher Buckley. THREE will US/Canada (no PO Box) candidates will be randomly chosen on October 1st. To enter for a chance at a copy of this book, please comment below.

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