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DON'T WORRY, IT GETS WORSE by Alida Nugent

DON'T WORRY, IT GETS WORSE

One Twentysomething's (Mostly Failed) Attempts at Adulthood

by Alida Nugent

Pub Date: May 7th, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-452-29818-7
Publisher: Plume

Debut comedic memoir based on the 20-something author's popular blog.

In 2010, Nugent graduated from college with a degree in creative writing, "diploma in one hand, margarita in the other." Despite an exhaustive job search, she found herself unemployed and broke. Facing impending student-loan payments, she opted to move back to her parents' home. Nugent writes with a sardonic sense of humor, rife with self-deprecation, about the trials, financial and otherwise, of being an educated, jobless, single woman in her early 20s. Almost all of her stories involve alcohol, and early on, Nugent even encourages readers to drink while reading her book. In a list of tips on how to save money, she suggests foregoing coffee in favor of using "good old-fashioned fear of the unknown to keep yourself awake." After a few months, she successfully launched herself out of the nest and into a walk-up apartment in Brooklyn, where she eventually returned to working in retail. Her forays into "adulthood" included hosting a party featuring a game of strip poker and a few tame, vaguely described experiments with online dating. With limited outlets to publish her writing as a freelancer, she started her personal blog, The Frenemy, as a platform to vent her frustrations and humorous autobiographical experiences. Her memoir reads like a blog: a series of loosely structured essays and rants that work on their own as conversational pieces but collectively lack overall cohesion. Nugent's voice comes across as loyal and tough, and her sense of humor and authenticity will appeal to readers going through related chapters in their own post-college lives.

This book, like one of its myriad cocktails, is dry, dirty and surprisingly refreshing.