Book Review: I Hate Myselfie

I Hate Myselfie:A Collection of Essaysby Shane DawsonKeywords Press, 2015Anyone actually deciding to read Shane Dawson's debut “essay” collection I Hate Myselfie without already knowing who he is – a categorical null set if ever there was one – will get a low-wattage, vaguely comfortable vibe from the reading experience. Casually turning page after page of easy humor and gentle self-deprecation will strike these nonexistent readers as a bit like reading a worshipfully imitative pastiche of David Sedaris by his clever and incredibly potty-mouthed kid brother (every fourth word of the book – including in its Dedication, to the author's mother - is a variation of something rhyming with “luck,” and if Dawson thinks that adds humor, he's mistaken, and if he thinks it “keeps things real,” he's mistaken about that too). The Shane Dawson in these pages stumbles from mishap to mishap in high school, the workplace, dating, and friendships, always palm-smacking himself on the forehead, always encouraging his readers to be glad they don't tend to screw things up as badly as he does. “Feel free to laugh at my misfortune,” he writes, “and get that feeling of 'Wow, my life is SO much better than THAT guy's.'”There are misadventures at the hair stylist, exacerbated by Dawson's recurring conceit of being the ex-fat kid, always on the verge of despair about his appearance:

As I reached for another decade-old magazine my “stylist” walked up to greet me. I put “stylist” in quotes because her cosmetology certificate looked like it was printed on the back of a Denny's placemat. My expectations for this haircut were about the same as when I walk into an Eddie Murphy movie. I know it's going to be bad, but maybe it will give people a few laughs. I like to spread joy even if it's at my expense.

And there are stories (the less often we refer to any of this content as “essays,” the fewer times E. B. White will have to roll over in his grave) about young high school-age Dawson trying pathetically to fit in, idolizing all the wrong peers for all the wrong reasons:

The leader of my group was a girl named Tara. She was a fun, loud free spirit with more sexual experience than most of the teachers. And that's a fact. There was a rumor that she gave one of our teachers the clap. She was everything I wanted to be (minus the clap part). She wasn't afraid to take fashion risks or hit on strangers. Life was her chem lab, and she was constantly experimenting, whereas I was stuck in remedial math class adding up the consequences of any risk I could take.

But all these competent-enough turns at the kind of stumblebum stand-up comedy scripts writers like Sedaris have turned into publishing gold are far, far from the point of a book like I Hate Myselfie. David Sedaris was an ordinary person when his knack for funny storytelling was discovered and encouraged into the product it is today – in fact, the ordinary-person part was the whole point of the product.Nothing could be further from the case with somebody like Shane Dawson, who was a celebrity on YouTube for years before anyone thought to create a book like I Hate Myselfie – indeed, the book only exists because the young guy on its cover could guarantee it baseline sales ten times what would normally be expected for a debut work of nonfiction. He starred in years of his own watchable, compulsively foul-mouthed, goggle-eyed videos about how weird high school life is, and his audience of teenage girls and gay boys has grown, on multiple channels and strategically-varied “platforms,” into dozens of millions. If even ten percent of that audience felt moved to buy this book, it would do very well indeed.Those YouTube videos perform a very narrow, sure-fire script: Shane used to be fat, Shane used to be ostracized, Shane has enormous puppy-dog eyes, Shane is therefore relatable. This script may have started out as a rough approximation of the truth, but those days are long, long since over. The scripts – the videos – stay scrupulously the same (YouTubers don't “mess with the clicks” - if it works on extremely impressionable teenagers, stick with it no matter what), but the reality now bears no resemblance to them whatsoever. In reality, Shane Dawson has been professionally stylized to resemble a movie star; in reality, Shane Dawson has very likely not only fired people but fired them while yelling at the top of his lungs; in reality, Shane Dawson is a multi-millionaire who can indulge in any whim of expense or travel and probably doesn't spend that much time agonizing over the fact that he was an overweight high school freshman.“In this book,” we read in I Hate Myselfie, “you'll get to see the real me, not the 'me' you see on YouTube.” It's one of the only occasions on which the book outright lies, but from a marketing perspective, it's a necessary lie – the necessary lie. All those teenage followers don't want to see a Shane Dawson in these pages who's appreciably different from the Shane Dawson who's been teaching them profanities and making them laugh for the last seven years, and he would no more allow it to reflect the real Shane Dawson than he'd fill it with the geometry of Euclid.Instead, the book is a point-by-point textual reconstruction of “Shane Dawson TV,” and that's not entirely a bad thing. In his videos, he's got undeniable comic timing and on-camera charisma, and the translation of that persona to the printed page, the discovery of a new David Sedaris, adds some light levity to the bookstore shelves and hardly aims for more. The bad thing in all this is the floodgate it opens for the transformation of Dawson's fellow YouTube stars into auteurs. Joey Graceffa, for instance, another handsome young multi-millionaire but goat-stupid where Dawson is clever (he rose to fame mainly by taking viewer “challenges” like painting his face or eating whole spoonfuls of cinnamon), is likewise getting a book from the Keywords Press subdivision of Simon & Schuster. It comes out in May. It's a collection of his philosophies about life.