Important Things That Don't Matter: A Novel

By David Amsden

So Dad's around lately. That's it. And I want to tell you things, throw fragments your way that I barely understand. Because it's just funny, flat out, the way someone you don't even know can get up in your face, tweak things that should be so ordinary. Or I think it's funny. Maybe you will too.

Hailed by The New Yorker as "a fictional report from the strip-mall front lines of Generation Y," Important Things That Don't Matter is a provocative, moving, darkly funny portrait of family and divorce, a boy and his father, the eighties and nineties, and sex and intimacy that raises vital questions about a generation just now reaching adulthood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061882104

Reviews for Important Things That Don't Matter

[daland_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really quite depressing, yet very well written. A good story of the trials of growing up as a dysfunctional Generation Y kid.

[winshoe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

An unnamed protagonist recounts his youth, mainly revolving around the divorce between his mom and his cocaine-addicted dad.I really like Amsden's writing voice -- it's rambling, but it's calculated rambling. Parts of this book were darkly hilarious, like when his dad takes him to a crack house and then the author (who is 9 or 10 at the time) watches a porn video while his dad and some other guy do coke in another room. Overall, the topic isn't original (divorce and its consequences), but sylistically, this book is great.