Well, this is exhausting Essays

Sophia Benoit, 1992-

Book - 2021

Like so many women, Benoit spent her formative years struggling to do the "right" thing-to make others comfortable, to take minimal and calculated risks, to live up to society's expectations-only to realize that there was so little payoff to this tiresome balancing act. Now, in Well, This Is Exhausting, she shares her journey from aspiring good girl to proud feminist, and addresses the constantly shifting goalposts of what exactly it means to be "good" in today's world. Including topics as varied and laugh-out-loud funny as how to be the life of the party (even when you have crippling anxiety), navigating the disappointments of the dating world, and why no one should judge you for having an encyclopedic knowled...ge of reality TV stars, these essays are sure to move, motivate, and charm you.

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Subjects
Genres
Humor
Essays
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Gallery Books 2021.
Language
English
Main Author
Sophia Benoit, 1992- (author)
Edition
First Gallery Books hardcover edition
Physical Description
xviii, 312 pages ; 24 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN
9781982151935
  • Introduction
  • Section 1. In which I try really hard to be a good kid for my parents, miss out on a normal youth because I was fat, and then date someone who sucks.
  • Bless You, Brendan Fraser
  • Too Many Servings of Ketchup
  • Exactly the Woman I Thought I'd Be When I Grew Up
  • How to Use Your Parents' Divorce to Get Kicked Out of Gym Class
  • "I'm Difficult." -Sally Albright (but Really Nora Ephron)
  • The Tyranny of Great Expectations
  • What I Wouldn't Give to Be a Teen in a Coke Ad
  • Things I Want My Little Sisters to Know, Which I Will Write Here Since They Aren't Texting Me Back Right Now
  • The Idea Is to Look Like an Idiot
  • How to Hate Yourself Enough That Men Will Like You (but Not So Much That They'll Be Turned Off)
  • Section 2. In which I try really hard to impress shitty men, discover Skinnygirl piña colada mix, and learn how to do eye makeup.
  • One Time I Listened to the Sara Bareilles Song "Brave" to Work Up the Courage to Ask a Guy Out (I'm Embarrassed for Me Too)
  • Everything I've Ever Done to Impress Men (and How Successful Each Was)
  • Cracking Open an Ice-Cold Bud Light
  • I'm Not Doing Zumba with You
  • Good Coffee and Why Pierce Brosnan's Voice in Mamma Mia! Is Perfectly Fine
  • I'm Pretty Sure My Insatiable Capacity for Desire Stems from the Scholastic Book Fair
  • Everyone I've Ever Wanted to Like Me
  • The Greatest Joy on Earth Is Getting Ready to Go Out
  • Adventures at a Lesser Marriott
  • Section 3. In which I get very tired of trying so hard, realize I was wrong about almost everything, and save my boyfriend's life.
  • Kirkwood, Missouri
  • The Internet Made Me a Better Person
  • Imaginary Dinner Party
  • Not to Be Cliché, but I'm Going to Talk About My Vagina (and Tits)
  • There Were Two Different Songs Called "Miss Independent" in the 2000s. Why Is No One Talking About This?
  • How Exactly to Be Likable
  • Sorry, Dove, but I Am Never Going to Love My Body
  • How to Be the Life of the Party in 28 Easy Steps
  • I Check to Make Sure My Boyfriend Is Still Breathing When He's Sleeping
  • A Short Letter to Responsible People
  • Riding Shotgun with My Hair Undone in the Front Seat of Margaux's Truck
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
Review by Booklist Review

Readers looking for an entertaining escape from their everyday grind will appreciate the opportunity to take a moment or two to see the world from sex and relationship advice columnist, comedian, and Twitter darling Benoit's point-of-view. This collection of 30 brief personal essays, some with bonus content in the form of footnotes that feel like a friend's whispered asides, spans the years from her less than idyllic childhood to the present. Benoit's engaging writing style invites laughter while she sparks serious contemplation on a variety of topics, from being caught between warring divorced parents to considering the damage done when expectations about someone are based solely on gender and society's skewed judgement of different body shapes and sizes. Readers suffering from a short attention span can easily read one essay at a time before wandering off, but will most likely return quickly for more. Benoit's memoir-in-essays is a good suggestion for fans of I'm Fine . . . and Other Lies (2017) by Whitney Cummings, Approval Junkie (2016) by Faith Saile, and works by Roxane Gay and Samantha Irby.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

GQ sex columnist Benoit debuts with a riotous collection of essays illuminating her rocky path to self-acceptance. More than anything, she notes, "It's the story of how I learned how to be good for myself rather than for other people." Starting with her 1990s childhood, Benoit writes candidly about her life as an overachieving youth in Kirkwood, Mo.; her years as a worrisome college student; and her eventual transformation to burgeoning young feminist. After her parents divorced when she was young, she and her sister bounced back and forth between their mom and dad's lofty expectations, which always caused "a film of blame." This led to extraordinary anxiety for Benoit, which followed her throughout her adolescence, as she aimed to please everyone but herself. But after trying everything from reinventing herself as a "chill girl" working at a hockey warehouse to being a beta tester in college for the dating app Bumble--which was "full of filthy-hot men"--she discovered Twitter and an army of female comedians railing against lousy dudes and finally realized a man's approval wasn't all it's cracked up to be. "I had reached another plane of existence and that existence was 'If you fucking speak to me, I'll murder you.' " Heartening and hilarious, this is prime summer reading material. Agent: Jessica Felleman, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency. (July)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Anyone who has ever felt like an outcast, like they missed the class where everyone else learned how to kiss, or how to behave in social settings, or how to respect yourself and others, will relate to GQ writer Benoit's essay collection. In it, Benoit writes about growing up early and being hyper-responsible; in the next breath, she discusses unrequited crushes, body image issues, and her willingness to do anything to be accepted. This memoir epitomizes growing up as a Millennial-Gen Z cusper, with all of the accompanying fears and desires; doing whatever it takes to be liked and wanted; and the resulting fallout and restructuring of self. Benoit's writing style is like a witty, long-form tweet--familiar, pithy, and off-the-cuff. Prepare to feel like you know Benoit personally, as some chapters are written with a level of intimacy uncommon in most memoirs. VERDICT Benoit brings her A game in her first book, a new addition to the recent spate of brutally honest memoirs. Recommended for fans of Samantha Irby.--Ahliah Bratzler, Indianapolis

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

A 20-something comedian and journalist explores how she "learned to be good for herself rather than for other people." For Benoit, a sex and relationship advice columnist for GQ, trying to "beat the system just by behaving" is impossible, especially as a woman or member of a marginalized community. A people-pleaser who strove to be "a good kid" for her divorced parents, she grew up feeling pressured to follow standards of female beauty and behavior that did not fit her. As a teen with a "voracious sexual appetite," she struggled with the conventional notion that males were the only ones allowed to express desire. That she happened to be overweight made her desires seem transgressive and "something to tell jokes about." Consequently, she became "an approachable, kind, upbeat girl who didn't talk too much." Through college, she dated a series of "hot asshole[s]" who treated her poorly. Not until she became a young professional did Benoit cultivate meaningful friendships with other women that allowed her to stop prioritizing the "male gaze" over her own happiness. Tired of trying so hard to please men, she eventually tried online dating for a period of time ("Cocktober") and discovered that she "liked hooking up with strangers." In finding the nurturing love she thought was as "sappy" as the romance novels she secretly adored, the author began to understand that the socially lauded female independence she admired was part of a "hypercapitalistic fantasy of girl power" that put women in an impossible double bind. Though often sharply observed, Benoit's essays offer too many details, which she often footnotes with observations on her own observations, as well as trivialities--e.g., how-to lists and hit-or-miss film critiques "based on whether I thought [the protagonist's] character was a helpful or harmful depiction of adult womanhood." The result is a book that should appeal to young women but that also exhausts rather than satisfies. Humorous, intermittently insightful, but overdone. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Bless You, Brendan Fraser Bless You, Brendan Fraser Like most people, I experienced my sexual awakening during the horse scene of the award-nominated film George of the Jungle (1997). If you don't know the scene, let me explain: Leslie Mann takes Brendan Fraser--whose body is BANGIN' HOT and whose long hair is LUSTROUS-- to her ritzy engagement party to another man, Thomas Haden Church. George/Brendan is wearing an impeccably tailored (for the '90s) suit, which is already enough to get anyone's engine (vagina) going, but then he leaves the party to go hang out outside with animals (relatable as hell). He climbs into a pen with some horses that are on the property, because rich people always have horses, and he starts running around with them like he's in a horny perfume ad. Naturally, all the hot single women at the party come watch this sexy display. A couple of men scoff and ask, "What is it with chicks and horses?" which is a valid, if sexist, observation. I maintain this is the first time in cinema that women's sexuality was fully understood. It can be no coincidence that Sex and the City premiered the following year, building off what GotJ had already laid down. I was only about four or five when I first saw this movie, and yes, that does feel young for me to have my sexual awakening, but it's never too early to get horny. After I saw this magnificent film, I was destined to be thirsty forevermore. Actually, I don't know how much it has to do with Brendan Fraser; I was just a horny kid. Strictly speaking, when GotJ came out, I was already getting in trouble for masturbating during nap time at preschool, even though I had no idea what I was doing. I was just humping things constantly, which is a fairly normal thing for kids to do, it turns out. I didn't know that, though. It's not like you can tell a four-year-old that it's normal to want to hump things but that they can't because of society's complex, horrid relationship with sex. I eventually got the message that I wasn't supposed to be jerking off in public, even though no one really explained it to me. What I did glean from the adults around me was that there was supposed to be shame around whatever it was that I did before bed every night; I often tried to quit. I would go weeks or months, proud of myself for having given up my nightly ritual, only to relapse. This was not long after Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the first Black surgeon general of the United States, was asked to resign after saying that masturbation was "part of human sexuality." In 1994, by Bill Clinton. The famously sexually appropriate president. When I was about thirteen, my mom sat me down for the number one most mortifying conversation of my life and informed me that what I had been doing every night since I was a child was masturbating and that that's what sex felt like. I, of course, was fucking pissed. That's it? That's what sex is like? What a total scam! Here I thought I had another cool thing to experience on the horizon, but nope! I'd already been doing it since preschool. Seeing my disappointment at this, my mother assured me that sex would be so much better because it was with another person, and I rolled my eyes and was like, Yeah, fucking right, Mom. There's no way anyone knows how to do this better than I do. And for the most part, I have been right about that. Sex has rarely been better--or at least more reliable or easier--than masturbating, in my personal experience. Another total scam. I didn't grow up in a household that shunned sexuality. There used to be a magazine rack at my dad's house that held dozens of magazines; I believe my dad and stepmom had it custom-made since my dad subscribed to so many. There was one magazine that was on the rack that I loved. It had Tyra Banks on the cover, topless, with her long hair covering her boobs. The cover said, "Tyra, please pull back your hair." I would often sneak into the living room when no one was around to look at it. I remember a pinup calendar in my dad's basement office that featured a naked woman wrapped in cellophane for December (she's an object--get it?). I remember December because that calendar stayed up on the wall in the basement for years after my father moved his office up to the attic. Only once did I work up the courage to take the calendar off the wall and peek at the other months before setting it back to December. My mother, for her part, was even less of a prude. In a hyperrational move typical of her, my mom never minded sex scenes in movies, as long as there wasn't violence; at age ten I saw my first R-rated movie, Love Actually , where we see quite a bit of Martin Freeman and Joanna Page (at least there are no guns). When my older sister Lena and I asked what sex was when I was about six, Mom calmly explained (in an age-appropriate way) about bodies and babies. She never found sex repulsive or embarrassing. She wasn't crossing weird boundaries with Lena and me or anything; she was just clear that safe sex isn't a big deal. No one in my house was selling the lie that sex ought to be shameful, but I still got the message anyway. You can't live in America and not get the message that sex is wrong. I got it from the way movies were screened for children and what we were allowed to talk about at recess, and most of all, I think, I understood sex is shameful because of the general silence and discomfort around the topic. Children have a keen sense of what is Not to Be Discussed. On top of the normal American puritanical shit, I had another reason to feel disgust with my sexual appetite: I was fat. And in my filled-with-internalized-fatphobia-mind, fat people--especially fat teens--were not allowed to be sexual. When I saw Hairspray in theaters with a group of my size 0 friends, I remember burning with resentment that Carly Wooldridge loved the movie. She wasn't fat! A movie starring an overweight and horny teenage girl?! This movie was mine . I bought the soundtrack immediately simply to express to everyone that I liked the movie more than Carly did; unfortunately, she already owned the CD and no one else was keeping score. She was obsessed with Zac Efron, and I with the idea that a fat teenager could be attractive to someone as hot as Zac Efron. The relationship between Tracy and Link in the movie was the ultimate fantasy for me. Unfortunately, in real life, perhaps because I didn't end segregation on my local TV station or have an amazing singing voice--not that either of those things would have likely impressed the guys at my school--I was destined to be alone. This was a particularly heartbreaking prospect since I was constantly in love with and wildly horny for everyone around me. My father similarly grew up a fat kid and as such placed an oversize importance on people being attracted to him. I don't think he's been single-single--like not dating anyone --since he lost weight at nineteen. His best friend Jim once commented, "I don't think he'd be like this if he'd just been asked to one Sadie Hawkins dance." And I think Jim's right, both about my father and about me. The longer I went without getting sexual attention, the more I got into watching and reading about it, and the media I was consuming only reinforced the belief that I needed to be thinner in order for someone to ever want me. There is something about youth, at least as we see youth in media, that promises sexual experiences, even if they be rushed and unsatisfying, and when you don't get those experiences, you feel like a FREAK. This is especially true for women. There is no shortage of messages, both explicit and implicit, screaming at you that the most sexually desirable thing you can be is a teenage girl (so fucked-up). This just made me even more hurt and angry that as a teenage girl I wasn't sexually desirable to anyone around me. It wasn't just my perception, either. It's not like that problematic but highly catchy One Direction song where I just didn't know that I was beautiful, thus making myself desirable to men. No, media and fellow ninth graders were very clear on the issue of fat women: not hot. Funny, sure. Slobbish? Yeah. But not hot. I In recent years, there have been two rom-coms made about hot guys falling for overweight women, but only AFTER THEY GOT HIT IN THE HEAD AND ENDED UP AT THE HOSPITAL. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of movies about a schlubby guy somewhere between fourteen and fifty-four years old trying to hook up with someone way out of his league, and in none of them did the protagonist even have to go to urgent care. The messaging is clear: if you're a girl who isn't under 135 pounds, you would have to have a traumatic brain injury to think you could get with an attractive guy. If you ever want to have sex, ladies, your job is to be hot. (And by hot , we mean thin.) And, boy, did I ever want to have sex! Even if it was the same as jerking off. My sister Lena, who is three years older and hundreds of times bolder than I am, started buying Cosmopolitan magazine when she was fourteen. I immediately started stealing them from her room, which rightfully drove her nuts, and often led to blowout screaming matches. My mom would try desperately to mitigate these fights by saying, "Lena! It's not like she's going to read the words off the page!" Which is true, but to be fair, stealing them was fucked-up of me. The thing was: Cosmo is horny, and once I found that out, there was no way I wasn't going to steal it. Cosmo was the only "person" willing to talk to me about sex; everyone else avoided the topic with me aggressively. It's wild to me that the horniest mainstream magazine for women is mostly just sex tips on how to make sex feel better for men, when men get to watch and read all kinds of porn directed right at them. Because we are required to be virginal and pure and adventurous sexual objects who exist solely for the pleasure of men. That's why our sex advice is about making him come. So while I loved Cosmo , she also let me down. Where was the porn for me ? Do you realize just how few depictions there are in popular culture of young horny women? Or even adult horny women? Fleabag felt like a revelation because it depicted a woman wrestling with her sexual desire in a deeper way than the broad strokes of horniness they gave Samantha in Sex in the City . Women who are nuanced, competent individuals who want to have sex that makes them feel good and who aren't the butt of a joke? There are like four movies total that have characters like this, and they're all indie movies that didn't do well commercially but should have. Pretty much every other movie on earth is about a horny dude, with the possible exception of the Harry Potter films, because there's no sex at all in them, which is boring as fuck . (How did y'all make it through SEVEN books about teenagers where no one fucks and sucks? I truly cannot fathom this.) There is a truth universally acknowledged that men are constantly thinking about sex, and not just thinking about it, but seeking it out. Well, guess what, society? Ladies are horny, too! But that's not something we're supposed to talk about. When I was younger and somehow both much smarter (I got As in AP calc, bitch!!) and much dumber (I wasn't a feminist yet) than I am now, I spent a lot of my time around guys joking about female masturbation owing to the simple fact that no one else was talking about it, and it therefore got me attention. None of my female friends and I talked about it with each other, other than perhaps a onetime timid exchange of "Do you...?" / "Yeah? Me too." But I loved talking about it to guys because they were so shocked and, at least in my mind, excited to hear that women indeed did want to have sexual experiences. Looking back, I think I mostly just made everyone super-duper uncomfortable, but I thought that was a key part of jokes, because I watched too much Chelsea Lately at the time. I promise I'm better now. II Honestly, though, masturbation jokes and the reaction they got reinforced the idea that as someone who was both fat and a woman my enjoyment of sex--my simple desire to have sex with another person--was a type of transgression. Something to tell jokes about, if I wanted to talk about it at all. Something profane. The jokes were my way of trying to normalize my own voracious sexual appetite. This was before the days of Twitter and "Spit on me, Rachel Weisz," or "Hit me with a bus, Michael B. Jordan." I didn't know other women were also desperately horny. Even Cosmo often framed sex as something nice to do with a partner rather than an all-consuming preoccupation. While I was embarrassed by my seemingly insatiable desire for sex, there was one thing that went even beyond that shame: my interest in love. Up until at least college I could more easily watch TV in the same room as other people when someone was getting railed than I could when two people were declaring their love for one another. (Honestly, I still often find it squirm-worthy.) Masturbating and having sex were things I could, and did, joke about. They were cool but transgressive, I felt. Love was not. In no way was love cool. I was under the impression that it was feminine and, therefore, icky. While someone might put up with a thinner, hotter person wanting love from them, as a fat woman it felt like way too much to ask for. I convinced myself for many, many years that I actually found romantic love gross and overrated. That did not stop me from desperately consuming every single book, movie, and television show I could find about the topic. I have seen almost every single mainstream rom-com made since 1980, and many from before then. I read dozens of romance novels a year, usually within a day, and I have since I was about fourteen. Yes, I wanted to **** Brendan Fraser's ****, but I also thought that I could really end up marrying Heath Ledger someday, if I simply lost weight, and only if he agreed to give up smoking. In real life, I maintained a crush on at least one person virtually nonstop from age five (Michael Bernard) on. Clearly, on some level, I was still into the idea of love, even if I acted disgusted and above it. This was self-preservation. I suspected love was not coming for me. In sixth grade, I stupidly let one of my friends tell Ben Cannon that I liked him. I think I mostly liked him out of a sense of protection or pity for him, because a friend of mine, Annie Manwaring, was obsessed with him to the point of being creepy--she saved a Kleenex he threw at her once--and I thought he deserved better, which perhaps morphed into me liking him. Or maybe Annie just talked about him so much that I became preoccupied, too. Either way, when Ben found out that I liked/was scared for him, he looked up across the room of Mr. McGee's sixth-grade science class and let out a simple yet effective "Ew." I turned bright red and my whole body got hot. Like on-fire hot. Like a sunburn, but everywhere. It felt like I was being incinerated. What the fuck had I even been thinking letting someone tell him that I liked him? Never. Fucking. Again. But then seventh grade came along and I liked Dominic Coultrip, who was always super nice to me-- of course I liked him. Unless I was in a group project, no guy ever talked to me. III Guys talked to my friends, I joked around awkwardly on the periphery, the guys laughed and then returned their attention to my friends, girls who emitted polite giggles and fit into denim skirts. One day in computer lab Dominic Coultrip found out that I liked him-- Serial , please do a podcast to find out who told him. I carefully avoided him for the rest of the day until he approached me in Mrs. Goeke's science class (WHY IS IT ALWAYS SCIENCE CLASS?) and told me super, super kindly that he didn't like me at all but that I was very funny, which was so much worse than Ben's response, because while I agreed with Ben's assessment of me, I did not agree with Dominic's. I assured Dominic that I didn't actually like him--that someone had given him bad information--a lie, which he very generously let me tell. After that, I stopped telling friends about my crushes. What was the next person going to do when they found out I liked them, vomit? I'd barely survived disgust and condescending kindness. I didn't need any further confirmation that I was an ugly piece-of-shit hag whom no one would ever be horny for, the very thing I wanted most . At that time, I truly believed the zenith of human experience was someone being attracted to you. IV This belief caused me absolutely zero problems at all. Just kidding. Excerpted from Well, This Is Exhausting: Essays by Sophia Benoit All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.