Miss Misery

Written by Andy Greenwald

Narrated by Nick Landrum

Twenty-something David Gould's girlfriend just left him, he's faced with an impossible book deadline, he's obsessed with the online blog of a 22-year-old woman who calls herself Miss Misery, and a 17-year-old girl has a crush on him. If that's not enough, his cooler, hipper online self is soon co-opted by a hacker who threatens to ruin his life. Spin columnist Andy Greenwald delivers a funny, heartbreaking exploration of what it means to be young and in search of an identity in his debut novel.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Recorded Books, Inc.
• Release date: Mar 7, 2008
• ISBN: 9781440795640

Andy Greenwald

Andy Greenwald is the author of Nothing Feels Good. A senior contributing writer at Spin, his writing also appears regularly in Entertainment Weekly, Blender, The Washington Post, The Village Voice, MTV Magazine, and Tracks. He has made numerous appearances on MTV, CNN, MSNBC, VH-1, BBC, and ABC Radio. He lives in Brooklyn.

Reviews for Miss Misery

[bookmarque · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

While entertaining, this felt like an exercise on the part of the author to prove his hipness. Hippitude? Hipnacity? Whatever. It felt like showing off. I kept reading it despite feeling intentionally left out of what is clearly a huge inside joke. All the silly band name references, few of which I’ve heard of, the club and party references, the DJ slang and the New York writer vibe – all of it was lost on me and did not impress. Instead it felt choked with tedious detail. As a recorded book, it didn’t work as well as it probably did as a printed book, since a lot of it consists of blog entries and email and text messages. The parts that did work were David’s narration and his phone messages. Exactly how the alter ego became flesh is not explained. What happens to him in the end is also not explained. What happens in between is horribly funny in a malicious sort of way. David is written to be extremely likeable, but I found him annoyingly childish. I guess it’s the age difference. But even when I was 28, I had some brains and didn’t let myself in for the manipulation and stupidity that David lets himself in for. And he makes fun of early 20-somethings as being blindly young. Define irony. The whole part where Ashley comes to find him from her Mormon prison in Utah is a case in point. A smart man would have called the police and had her whiny ass hauled back to her ultra-conformist parents pronto. But no, he indulges her wish to stay the night. Then her desire to go to Coney Island. Then he lets her con him into driving with her to the airport where he realizes too late that when she said that he had to come with her, she meant all the way to Utah. He does, tapping into his parent’s “emergency” credit card. (who still has one of those at 28?) There he is further dragged and ends up at her chillingly stark and bleak home, only to be discovered by early returning parents. Of course he talks his way out of things and handles a situation that had it been orchestrated by his alter ego, he wouldn’t have a clue how to diffuse it. Air travel must have made him smarter.Meanwhile back in NY, things have come to a head and David 2 has trashed his house, ruined his credit and basically his life. With a stolen passport, DL and credit card, he’s booked a flight to The Hague to meet Amy, the erstwhile girlfriend. Now that David 1 appears to want what David 2 has, David 2 decides to want what David no longer does; Amy and a settled, domestic life of responsibility. The thing that David 1 cloaked himself in to such an extent that this alter ego sprang to existence.The upshot “message” is be true to yourself; all of yourself. Let all of your little foibles, bad habits and unnatural desires take hold and have a place in your life. If part of you wants to take drugs and be an asshole – do it and be it. If others don’t approve or don’t like you, they’re not worthy. How uplifting.

[amydross · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An author has got to be pretty self-obsessed to insert himself into his novel not once, but twice.Although there were many things I liked about this book, overall I would have to rate it a disappointment. The main problem is that Miss Misery/Cath Kennedy is so much more interesting than any of the other characters in the book. The author struggled to make the narrator and his doppelganger seem very different, but ultimately they both came off as whiney, indecisive, and dull. And the entire Ashleigh section felt like an unnecessary digression from the action. All that might have been forgivable, but two things weren't:1) On page twelve, the author describes a pigeon as "mordantly obese". I'm all for literary license, but I can't imagine that this is anything but a malaprop. Mr. Greenwald, if you're out there: mordant means biting. Wit can be biting, as can criticism. Biting fat, however, doesn't seem to mean much of anything. 2. Towards the end of the book, a family of deeply observant Mormons offers our narrator a cup of coffee. Now really, what's the one thing everyone on Earth knows about Mormons? No, it's not the plural marriages thing. MORMONS DON'T DRINK COFFEE. If you know *nothing* else, you should know that. Inexcusable.