Sunday, March 08, 2009

Pg. 99: Sara Barron's "People Are Unappealing"

The current feature at the Page 99 Test: People Are Unappealing: True Stories of Our Collective Capacity to Irritate and Annoy by Sara Barron.

About the book, from the publisher:
Born the child of a homo and a hypochondriac (Okay, okay. Her dad’s not really a homosexual. He just acts like it. Her mom, however, really is a hypochondriac), Sara Barron never stood a chance of being normal. At age eleven, she starts writing porn (“He humped me wildly with his wiener”). At twelve, she gets mistaken for a trannie. The pre-op sort, no less. By seventeen, she's featured on the Jerry Springer Show. And that’s all before she hits New York.

People Are Unappealing tells the strange, funny, and sometimes filthy stories of Sara Barron’s twisted suburban upbringing and deranged attempt at taking the Big Apple by storm–first as an actor (then a waiter), then a dancer (then a waiter), then a comic (then a waiter). It’s there that she meets the ex-boyfriend turned street clown. The silk pajama-clad poet. The OCD Xanax addict who refuses to have sex wearing any fewer than three condoms.

Barron has a knack for attracting the unattractive. People Are Unappealing is her wickedly funny look at the dark side of humanity.
Learn more about the book and author at Sara Barron's website.

Barron's essays have also appeared in the anthologies Mortified: The Big Book of Angst, Have I Got A Guy For You, and Rock and Roll Cage-Match. As a performer she's appeared on Showtime's This American Life, NPR's Weekend Edition, NBC's The Today Show, and at the 10th annual H.B.O. Comedy Arts Festival.

She hosts The Moth: Stories Told and teaches humor writing at Gotham Writer's Workshop. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Page 99 Test: People Are Unappealing.

--Marshal Zeringue