Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin
by Paul Feig
Three Rivers Press, 304 pp., $13.95 (paper)
By the time Paul Feig’s new memoir, Superstud, brings up “A Peanut Butter Evening,” a one-act play he wrote at age 19, it is abundantly clear that the man will reveal anything, no matter how filthy. I mean, if you tried to impress a girl by asking her to read your attempt at mature drama concerning a lonely young man hiring a hooker to take his virginity, only to discover the outsourced deflowerer is his long-lost mother, and you lived to tell the tale, would you tell it? To anyone? Ever? After that, nothing’s shocking, not even the author’s account of a near-death experiment with fellating himself.The creator of TV’s cult classic Freaks and Geeks and writer of another memoir, Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence, Feig is no stranger to mining embarrassment’s riches, and Superstud ranks high among his work for going so low, starting with the cover photo of the author tap-dancing in a white suit and working its way down. So if much of the prose plods and the vaudeville of humiliation ultimately dissolves into something like a nice liberal dad’s dorky birds-and-bees summation before a very embarrassed son, the power of these tales lies in their clear-eyed horror show of religion, suburban legend, mass media, and youth culture besetting the vulnerable sexual morality of a budding 24-year-old virgin.
While I’m not sure I want to know as much about anyone’s masturbation habits as I now know about Feig’s, it’s the tortured logic guiding his behavior in Superstud that truly shocks, appalls, and evokes horrified recognition. Aimed squarely at grownup nerds, it’s anti-nostalgia that brutally takes up where Freaks and Geeks must leave off, though I can’t help wondering if the most ideal readership isn’t today’s scrawny mathletes cowering in gym class and the girls who will someday love them. For adventurous parents of romantically inclined high school pariahs, could this be a cautionary and consoling gift book awaiting its moment, a scandalous companion to Oh the Places You’ll Go!? For all the raunch, Superstud certainly has its heart in the right place, and Feig does recognize some limits. Thank god he doesn’t include the text of “A Peanut Butter Evening.”
This article appears in July 8 • 2005.