“You’re Not That Pretty” & Other Things My Parents Told Me: Stories from the chaos

This memoir (of sorts) slips ‘n slides from the fifties on up to the nineties in a few dozen bizarrely true tales, by award-winning and Emmy-nominated comedy writer, Debbie Kasper, who has already been hailed “a female David Sedaris.” A deliciously honest memoir splattered with so many scathing family secrets, that she had to wait for some people to die to even write it. Her collection of acerbic, hilarious, sometimes poignant tales drops us smack into the middle of the fifties & sixties, inside the chaotic Kasper house–a home where bourbon rules, hamsters roam freely, and sanity runs scared. Debbie’s parents smoke and drink like they only have a day to live, spewing out twisted advice like, “Don’t have children, you’ll just end hating half of them.” Debbie navigates through the suburban jungle of three brothers who dangle snakes in her face, hide mice in her bras, jump out of second-story windows, crack open fish tanks and eventually set the place on fire. During the Summer of Love, Debbie’s parents throw their kids a surprise half-sister, just in time to watch her go mad. Her adventures include (but are not limited to): making best friends with a Mafia hitman’s daughter, getting terrorized by Jersey Diner waitresses at her first summer job, and missing the moon landing altogether—thinking there’d be other chances. Debbie stampedes through the seventies and eighties armed with terrible parental advice and a drinking problem all her own—she gets busted at the German border, caught shoplifting, dressed as a clown, misses her date with Billy Joel, and is at a comedy gig the night a stabbed transvestite hooker bleeds to death knocking on her NYC apartment door. Her stories are wild, but it’s her ironic perspective, relentless humor, and indomitable spirit that steer the pages of this hilariously self-effacing and provocative memoir. “You’re Not that Pretty,” is also a bit of a reunion for baby boomers—one that you don’t have to drop twenty pounds to go to.