I'm Fine...And Other Lies
Whitney Cummings
INTRODUCTION
When I was about twelve years old, one of my favorite things to do, besides making desperate audition tapes for MTV’s The Real World, was going to yard sales and perusing strangers’ junk. I (of course) mean peruse the stuff they were selling, although I’m sure I also checked out a couple of dudes’ actual junk on more than one occasion given I was a very curious child and this was before porn was free.
I loved looking at the tables of old trinkets and fabricating a narrative of what the sellers’ lives were like. Old skis, a chessboard, and dusty encyclopedias inspired me to fantasize about the sellers’ mysterious lives; maybe they were detectives, spies, or on the run from the law for some glamorous crime they’d committed! In retrospect, I now realize they were probably just going through a divorce and needed to get rid of their exes’ shit ASAP, but at the time this activity was a romantic escape from reality and perhaps the first evidence that I wanted to make up stories for a living. I was also a pathological liar until I was, like, fifteen but that’s a way less sexy genesis of my occupation.
During one of these garbage-ogling sessions I came across a book called Couplehood by Paul Reiser. At the time I was too young to know who Paul Reiser was (and some of you might still be), but in this book he hilariously recounted the daily confusions and humiliations of being in a committed relationship. At that point in my life I had never been in a committed relationship with anything except anxiety and head lice, and I’m pretty sure my imaginary marriage to Luke Perry didn’t count.
I somehow related to the book anyway. Reading about Reiser’s foibles made me feel relieved and weirdly understood. Whether I could articulate it or not back then, I had some sort of epiphany that other people’s misfortune made me feel way better about my own problems. I believe the official term for this phenomenon is schadenfreude. Count on the Germans to have a specific word for something so sadistic.
Couplehood made me feel less ashamed of the twisted, often inverted way that I saw the world. It also made me feel better about how obsessed I got over minutiae that most people didn’t even seem to notice. Nobody else seemed to care about how weird it was that the salad bar at the Sizzler had chocolate pudding right next to the chickpeas, but this took up space in my brain for days as I tried to figure out what kind of psychopath did the arranging of the fixin’s. Nobody seemed as stressed out as I was that Band-Aids always felt slightly racist for not having a selection of different shades of skin colors. I’m sure by now they have a kaleidoscope of shades available, but in the late eighties only waxy white people could protect their wounds without drawing too much attention to them.
Nobody wanted to listen to my rants about the injustice of racially insensitive Band-Aids, so I was inspired to write down my observations whenever I could. I found an old typewriter in my aunt’s basement and hacked away at it every chance I got. Yes, there were computers back then, but computers saved documents, and I didn’t want to risk anyone reading my insane diatribes. Plus, the typewriter made me feel smart and sophisticated. I mean, to feel sophisticated I probably could’ve just stopped curling my bangs, but at that point in my life common sense wasn’t really on my radar.
I always dreamed that these masturbatory ramblings would one day be the seed of a book, but my self-esteem has always been too low to follow through. I always told myself I’d wait to write a book until I had accumulated enough entertaining mistakes to actually make the read worth your time. I realize it’s a big deal that you’re even holding this given how much is available for entertainment these days: YouTube videos of babies eating lemons, girls falling off stripper poles, and apps that remix your face with a dog’s. Look, it took me forever to finish writing this book because of these exact distractions, but when I got focused enough to be able to finally get this stuff down, please know I set the bar high, constantly asking myself, “Can this compete with a video of a guy falling off a ladder on the Home Shopping Network?”
I was finally able to stave off my social media and online shopping addictions long enough to give you a whole book’s worth of yummy, humiliating schadenfreude. For example, I’ve shaved an entire eyebrow off after eating too much edible weed, started balding from not eating enough fat, broke my shoulder trying to impress a guy, and came very close to spending my life in a Guatemalan prison. For years, I’ve kept these stories as bullet points in overpriced journals, figuring I would eventually find the courage to talk about them onstage, but they were just too embarrassing. That said, I actually think these stories are better illustrated in book form or on virtual eyeball drones or whatever people are reading with by the time this book comes out.
In addition to hoarding mortifying situations that’ll make you feel way better about your own choices, I’ve also accumulated a compendium of knowledge that I believe can save you a lot of time. Look, you’re busy. You have a family, maybe even a secret family. You have a life, maybe even a double life. You have a husband, a wife, a Facebook page. I don’t have any of those things, so think of me as your personal assistant who went to a billion doctors and got you all the information you don’t have time to get yourself and that Wikipedia will lie to you about. Think of this book as the Internet if it was honest and didn’t hate women so much.
When I do stand-up, I need to make a joke about every twenty seconds. If I see someone in the audience cringing at what I’m saying or generally looking traumatized by the subject matter, I have to lighten the mood by changing the subject or deflecting with a joke. Writing a book gave me the freedom not to be funny every now and then so I could dig into some raw truths that I think can be healing for everyone. With a book, I can’t read the room or see your reaction so I’m able to go off the grid without y’all shaming me into keeping the material safe or socially acceptable. I’m finally able to share my most embarrassing foibles, whether it was lying to therapists, driving myself to the ER when I was hemorrhaging blood from my head, or having explosive diarrhea in a literal jungle.