Embrace Your Weird by Felicia Day

I love Felicia Day. She is perky (a word I hate, but which actually applies perfectly here), but also highly self-aware, self-deprecating, and funny. I’ve been a fan since Dr. Horrible and the Singalong Blog & The Guild. I liked her last book, You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) and recommend it. So, I wanted to like this new book. And I do. Her voice is still unique. She’s still upbeat and hilarious, even when talking about painful moments and crippling anxiety. “She’s a self-doubting introvert, just like me!”

I think it’s just the book’s topic that is not very exciting to me. Or rather, the topic – unleashing your creativity – is one that has been done over and over (ironically). I’ve read a mountain of books on overcoming writer’s block or achieving flow. And, as with any self-help-related treatise, such problems are difficult to overcome. So, many people turn to multiple sources for help.

I love the title, Embrace Your Weird, and it actually dovetails quite nicely with another book I reviewed recently, Jenny Slate’s Little Weirds. Both explore the struggle to create. But Embrace is formulated as a how-to manual, complete with workbook. Granted, the exercises encourage you to doodle and list and, essentially, deface the book itself which is satisfyingly subversive (though not great for library books…) However, that’s been done before, with the super popular Wreck This Journal, for example. So have many of the exercises Day encourages. There just wasn’t anything groundbreaking about the content, which is a shame because she’s made a name for herself by so things differently. But, I’ll gamely go along with some of the exercises, because they are, in fact, tried and true. And she’s funny. And I’m a fan.

Gallery Pocket Books. Publish date 10/1/19