You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia DayTouchstone (Simon & Schuster), 2015

I don’t read very many memoirs in this style (by which I mean, I guess, more conversational than literary), but this one was fun, particularly because my boyfriend recently introduced me to The Guild, which we’ve been watching on Netflix and which I’ve been liking a lot so far. Felicia Day (you may know her from TableTop? or Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog? or some TV shows?) writes about some of what she does and how she ended up doing it, starting with her childhood (in which she and her brother were “homeschooled for hippie reasons, not God reasons”) (13). She includes goofy childhood pictures and images of pages from her diary and talks about how being homeschooled meant she had freedom to “be okay with liking things no one else liked,” though it also meant loneliness (31). She writes about how transformative the Internet was for her, especially after she got involved in a message board for people who played the game Ultima. (There’s a whole hilarious story about how, when she was fifteen, her mom drove her and her brother to New Jersey so she could meet up with her Internet friends from this message board, and how her mom encouraged her to kiss one of the boys in the group.) She talks about going to college young and dealing/not dealing with her perfectionism, which is a thing that comes up in her adult life, too, when she graduates college and moves to LA to act and, later, write. I really liked the parts of the book about the period when Day was writing/filming The Guild, and I don’t think just because I’m watching it now – there’s a mix of humor and emotion in the way Day tells that story that’s really satisfying. The scene where she goes to her neighbor’s yard to ask if his gardener can turn off the leaf-blower for a while (because she and the Guild cast and crew are trying to film and it’s too noisy) made me laugh out loud on the train. Not that the book is all humor: Day writes about her experiences with anxiety and depression and Hollywood sexism/idiocy and online harassment in ways that feel brave and real.