You're Never Weird on the Internet

Reading this book did nothing to dissuade my conviction that Felicia Day and I should really be best friends. We could eat snacks and talk about Prodigy and introduce ourselves by GPA to people! It'd be magical!

I fell in love with Felicia Day sometime during the course of The Guild largely because I identified so strongly with Codex who Felicia admits is more than a little autobiographical. Since then her career as an actress, writer, producer, and all around stuff-tryer has been something of an inspiration in my life. I tried to tell her that at a convention once and we ended up apologizing to each other about fourteen times. It was magical, but not as magical as if I'd known to bring up childhood obsessions with Prodigy at the time.

This book is an extremely honest and open portrait of an oddball. It has light-hearted chapters about silly and serious things in her early life parts of which did literally make me laugh out loud, no internet acronym overuse intended. It also has starkly emotional accounts of her battles with anxiety, depression, and harassment which, again literally, made me tear up. It's pretty rare that books do either of those things to me, let alone what I at first assumed would most likely be a collection of her funniest tweets (I would have bought that too, mind you). In any medium Felicia has presented herself, I get the impression of a nervous but extremely genuine woman, and this book highlights that genuineness beautifully in both her strengths and weaknesses.

I don't read celebrity biographies terribly often, but the ones that I do seem to feature anxiety, depression, and the the feeling of being a fraud very prominently in their themes. They are always sad themes, but I find them extremely reassuring. I think a lot of people, myself included, cope with success by going “Oh God! I tricked everyone into thinking I'm good at this! One day they'll figure out their wrong and I will be crushed under the weight of my lies!!!” However, I think we all think we are the only ones who feel that, and all the supportive friends in the world can't truly crush that thought. Felicia's book reminded me that even my heroes feel that way, that it's okay to feel that way, and also that you can feel that way and still make good art.

On the off chance that Felicia is scrolling through Goodreads comments and finds this review (which from the content of the book is maybe not such an offchance but I would be doing the same thing), thank you for being brave enough to put this out in the world, Felicia.