Night Terrors: Sex, Dating, Puberty, and Other Alarming Things by Ashley Cardiff
My rating: 3/5 cats
ashley cardiff is the midpoint of funny between sloane crosley (emphatically unfunny) and jenny lawson (piss-yourself funny). and why am i only pitting her against other female humor writers and not being all gender-equality and letting her play rough with the humor-boys? because i am. and if you’re gonna get on my case about it, you are probably yourself utterly humorless.
the book’s a mixed bag – when she is good, she is very good. and there are things in here to which i can definitely, and unfortunately, relate.
…I eat like I should be wearing a helmet when I’m unsupervised…
ermm…
…Jesse was obsessed with Bruce Lee, which is a pretty cool obsession to have. He kept in shape by practicing Jeet Kune Do in his room while listening to electronica. If that doesn’t turn you on, you are probably not a sixteen-year-old girl.
replace that with king fu and shudder to think, and it rings a bell.
To provide a more succinct portrait of how broke I was then, right around that time I saw a man walking down the street eating two Twix bars side by side out of the wrapper – as if they were one candy bar – and I thought it was the truest expression of luxury I had ever seen.
dude, that still sounds like luxury to me, and i’m not broke.
and she occasionally has very astute things to say:
It takes a certain amount of adulthood to realize that being honest doesn’t make you good, it just makes you honest. You can be completely open and direct about your flaws but it doesn’t absolve you of them. Hopefully we can agree that lying is awful, but it’s important to add that being frank about your own awfulness doesn’t make you less awful. It makes you easier to identify.
and
college kinds are actually deeply uncreative when it comes to behaving badly. They mostly just drink and fuck and discover things like Bret Easton Ellis and psilocybin, which they grow out of if they’re decent in any meaningful capacity,
and it is, ostensibly, a book about sex, but if you are looking for a lurid chelsea handler type book about “things i have drunkenly shoved in my vagina,” it isn’t this. this is not shock value tales of intercourse. it’s just frequently funny stories about being shy and awkward and young and easily impressed. and the eye-opening crash-to-earth that happens when young romantically awkward girls start to see shit as it is, and not the way books tell you it is.
I stared at him throughout that entire first class and could not believe his cheekbones. It was a real infatuation at first sight and one that persisted even when he spoke. The first time I heard his voice was when our extremely urbane German sociology professor was tasked with answering a stood question about evolution. He mentioned, offhand, the lemur.
“Oh, yeah!” the beautiful one exclaimed, “Like aye-ayes.”
“Pardon me?” said the professor.
“Like those aye-aye things in Madagascar. Natives kill them because they think they’re, like, demons.”
The professor looked at him silently, straightened his glass and returned to talking about real things. In retrospect, this interaction revealed nothing appealing about him, but at the time I sat there in class drawing hearts on my notepad as my own swelled with thoughts of He likes animals! In this way, teenage girls have no survival skills and are unequipped for the world.
to my mind, what makes funny people funny is a lack of inhibitions. not the lack of inhibitions of the “i have slept with everyone i have ever met” variety, but a lack of vanity that says “yeah, this is me, sometimes i fuck up, and it’s funny.” and while she does relate embarrassing things here, it still seems like she is being careful. she is almost too nice to be truly hilarious. coming out of homeschooling, she is shy, tall, and awkward, squeamish about certain things, and a little judgey. but what saves her is that she knows when she is being judgey, and she owns it. just like she deflects a lot of things with humor, and speaks to her own imagined critics by pointing out all the ways in which she is guilty of the very things she is herself criticizing. it is seemingly an ingrained defense mechanism, but it is usually cute enough to pass.
it isn’t always laugh-out-loud funny, but it’s worth a read (but skip the stripper story) and she will probably get better as she gains confidence and ditches her attachment to the words “deeply” and “tangentially.”
this review does it better than me:
a point of interest – in the acknowledgments, she says
Strangely and unexpectedly, most of all: enormous gratitude to my dear friend Ben Lansky, who one day a few years ago in a yellowing stairwell was the first person to ever tell me I was funny. It surprised me at the time but I gave it a shot.
and that is what happens in our bloggy world when boys compliment pretty girls on something other than being pretty. they just run with it…
