It Gets Worse

April 11, 2016
Popular YouTube personality Dawson
(I Hate Myselfie) exhibits his signature brand of twisted humor and neuroses in his second volume of personal essays. A number of these trace his artistic and professional development from a high school video project to a sobering experience filming his first feature film for a reality show and dealing with eviscerating reviews. He frankly discusses the journey to accepting his bisexuality, beginning in kindergarten with simultaneous crushes on the pretty blonde girl and the spiky-haired bullying boy. This journey is fraught with sadness, as when he describes his tendency to “fill the void... with food and other addictions,” and comedy, as he takes a trip down the rabbit hole of hook-up apps. His self-deprecating and outrageous humor is hit or miss, but at its best it deserves comparison to David Sedaris, whether he’s writing, “I’m the opposite of a party animal. I’m a funeral person” or recalling wearing a flamboyant T-shirt on the first day of middle school and boarding a Bible study bus for the free candy. A story about ending up at the Mexican border after a wrong turn, however, is completely unfunny and entirely lacks the drama he tries to manufacture. This decent if lopsided second effort from a writer still finding his voice should satisfy Dawson’s previously established fans.

May 15, 2016
He's baaack. YouTube vlogger Dawson returns with a second collection of autobiographical essays (following I Hate Myselfie, 2015). His many fans (his YouTube channel has more than seven million subscribers) will enjoy his musings about his life from childhood, when he was morbidly obese, to his latter-day celebrity as a slimmed-down TV reality star and film director. The 13 essays collected here are a mixed bag; most, rooted in self-deprecation and hyperbole, are humorous, but some are quite moving. In one, he encounters the ghost of his beloved grandmother; in another, he records the bittersweet experience of producing his first public video; in yet another, wrestling with his sexualityhe has come out as bisexualhe tries to engineer his first sexual encounter with a male met on Craigslist; and, in the most personal of his essays, he records his five-year struggle with bulimia. When all is said and done, how funny are these essays? On a humor scale of 1 to 10, 1 being meh and 10 being a hoot, Dawson's essays earn a solid 7.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)