Public Apology

April 15, 2013
Compiled from his highly popular "Public Apology" column, Bry's satirical "letters" feature tongue-in-cheek apologies to a wide range of people from junior high, high school, and college, to New York City and adulthood. But these acts of contrition never make the reader really belly-laugh. Some of his misadventures in grade school stem from the hormonal silliness of adolescence and pubertyâterrifying young charges with a horror film, stealing a six-pack of beer, throwing empty cans on Jon Bon Jovi's lawn. Bry's confessions, although charged with the immediacy of nostalgic reflection, lack the manic juice of David Sedaris, or Dave Berry's candor. In the segments devoted to New York and adulthood, Bry's voice feels more at home. He slips into helter-skelter observations of his nutty episodes of "acting out," where situations or people call for a somewhat different decorum. Other than the unusually candid moments involving his ailing father and family, Bry's laugh fest does not translate from column to tome with humor or wit fully intact.

January 15, 2013
A New York-based blogger's memoir as told through a series of epistolary essays that apologize to individuals he knew as an adolescent and adult for his bad behavior toward them. In this book, self-revelation is inextricably bound with contrition. Bry begins his narrative in junior high, a time when, among other things, he offered two of his classmates and fellow "dorks" fake drugs and stole beer from the refrigerator of friends' parents so that his peers would see him as "cool." As he grew older, his immature behavior developed a distinctly darker, more self-destructive edge. He drank heavily, experimented with marijuana, cocaine and other drugs, betrayed friends and disappointed those closest to him, including his terminally ill father. On the day he died, Bry did not hear his cries for help and came to him only after it was too late. "I felt like a little boy who had just broken something important," he writes. Even after his father's death, Bry continued drinking, smoking pot and being a "dick" to everyone. He nearly failed out of college but managed to graduate and stumble into an internship at a music magazine in New York. He passed his 20s in a stupor, yet still found love with a woman who was as "generously accepting of his lifestyle choices" as she was of his being a sweatpants-wearing slob. The form Bry uses to tell the story gets tiresome, as does his constant apologizing to everyone (including people with whom he had only glancing contact) for his misdeeds. However, his candor and genuine desire to look at the ugliest parts of his personality and past do succeed in creating a compelling portrait of a human "work in progress." Compassionate but repetitive.

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February 15, 2013
Let's face it: we've all done things we regret. Most of us just prefer to keep these indiscretions to ourselves. Not Bry. He wants to go public. Again. And again. And again. In this amusing, if somewhat wearying, essay collection, he bemoans a surfeit of shameful behavior: spitting chewed horse meat back onto his plate in a Paris bistro, selling fake drugs to gullible junior-high classmates, wearing jeans with Jackson Pollockstyle bleach splatters to a friend's bar mitzvah. Wait, there's more, from the harmless (singing Stairway to Heaven into the ear of his dance partner during a school shindig) to the heinous (having sex with a friend's girlfriend). If confession heals the soul, Bry is giving his a 'round-the-clock massage. Among the parade of cringe-worthy regrets are some moving gaffes, too, like when Bry fails to answer his cancer-stricken father's call for help. For better or worse, Bry, now a dad, feels the need to come clean. It's a dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)