My Life as a Goddess

June 18, 2018
Comedian Branum, known for his appearances on Chelsea Lately, combines sharp insight and self-deprecating humor in this sparkling collection of essays about life as a fat gay comic. “If you are at all interested in being a goddess, may I suggest starting this book by believing in yourself?” he writes, setting the theme for his story beginning with his childhood. Growing up in the farm town of Yuba City, Calif. (“not the good part of California”), Branum always felt out of place, particularly with a wild sister and an abusive, controlling father. He enrolled at the Univ. of California at Berkeley as a Republican, but the liberal setting influenced him. He next attended law school at the University of Minnesota, where, working at a small legal publication where his “job was to keep track of how much a dead baby was worth,” he developed his dark sense of humor. With sparkling prose, the author offers an inspiring treatise on the accomplishments of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (with U.S. v. Virginia “she got to write the gender equal protection decision she’d been asking for all those years”), observations on the anti-gay sentiments in 1983’s Eddie Murphy: Delirious (which he enjoyed as a young adult but disliked as he got older), and a heartfelt musing on being a closeted gay man dating women, and his own coming out. This is an incisive and witty memoir.

June 15, 2018
A gay stand-up comedian considers his life through personal essays that also ruminate on problems and paradoxes of modern American culture.Branum was a born misfit who found early solace in Greek mythology. He especially loved Leto, a beleaguered goddess who taught him the importance of believing in himself when no one else did. Half-Jewish, overweight, and "intellectually aggressive," the author struggled to find a place in his hometown of Yuba City, where Oklahoma Dust Bowl descendants fired "guns into the air and yell[ed] racial slurs" at Indian immigrants. Branum educated himself about the outside world through reading and watching old sitcoms. Suburban witch Samantha Stephens, of Bewitched fame, became his symbol for the magic he sought in order to escape a hated blue-collar existence. By high school, Branum could no longer deny the desires that had surfaced in his early teens. Still, he remained closeted. He found comfort in friendship with three Punjabi girls trapped into asexuality by the conflicting demands of their culture. At Berkeley, he wrote for the humor magazine, ran for student office as a member of his own party (CUM, the "Cal Undergraduate Masturbators"), and wrote an article about Chelsea Clinton that resulted in a visit from the Secret Service. He attended law school at the University of Minnesota only to realize that he "had no business" becoming a lawyer and mimicking straightness. After graduation, Branum stumbled into adult functionality, discovered his passion for stand-up comedy, and moved to Los Angeles. There, he worked his way into writing jobs for Chelsea Lately and The Mindy Project, all while learning to love himself in West Hollywood, the "ketamine-stoked crucible of shallow gay self-consciousness and derision." Keenly observant and intelligent, Branum's book not only offers uproarious insights into walking paths less traveled, but also into what self-acceptance means in a world still woefully intolerant of difference.Wickedly smart, funny, and witty.

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