About the Book
"A strangely touching and engaging portrait of the artist as a young screwup."Booklist
"The ultimate joyride for those of us who enjoy cringe-worthy embarrassment, genuine pathos, and an overdosing amount of schadenfreude."Michael Ian Black
Peering into life's cringe-worthy moments, best-selling author Beth Lisick excavates territory that most would rather ignore. Funny, odd, deeply personal, yet somehow universal, these are the kind of memories that haunt us all, the small awful moments of shame and humiliation that we'd rather forget than relive.
Beth Lisick has made a career of opening her life to her readers in all of its messy, smart hilarity, but this type of story doesn't usually find its way into a memoir. With her trademark humor and sly intelligence, writing in short flashes the way these episodes tend to pop up in memory, Lisick recounts her most embarrassing moments with gusto. From a trick she played on a neighbor thirty years ago to what she accidentally blurted out at last night's dinner party, she explores the bad judgments and free-floating regrets that keep her up at night, and the result is a daring, candid, and wickedly funny collection of embarrassment embraced, the triumph of humor and perspective over everyday mortification.
Writer, performer, and independent film actress Beth Lisick is the author of the New York Times best-selling comic memoir Everybody Into the Pool and the gonzo self-help manifesto Helping Me Help Myself.
More Praise for Yokohama Threeway:
"This book is fucking great."Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill and The Julie Ruin
"Speaking as someone who hates everything, I love this book."James Greer, musician & author of The Failure
"Hilarious, heartbreaking, compassionate, pitch perfect, utterly original."Joyce Maynard, author of After Her and Labor Day
"A laugh-out-loud series of short, revelatory confessions propelled by curiosity and an acute desire to experience the world. It is not now and perhaps never will be quite in vogue for people to share their shames, but Lisick does it with aplomb and even exuberance."Evan Karp, SF Weekly
"Beth Lisick's new essay collection Yokohama Threeway made me laugh out loud more than anything else I have read all year, she is a master at sharing her life experiences with self-deprecating yet honest humor."David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
"Yokohama Threeway and Other Shames, by Porchlight cofounder Beth Lisick, divulges the author's most embarrassing moments in a series of short essays dripping with wicked humor."7x7 Magazine
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About the Author :
Beth Lisick is a writer and performer from the San Francisco Bay Area. Her books include the New York Times bestselling comic memoir Everybody Into the Pool and the gonzo self-help manifesto Helping Me Help Myself. Lisick has toured the U.S. and Europe as a solo spoken word performer, front person for the band the Beth Lisick Ordeal, and member of the groundbreaking queer roadshow Sister Spit. Her other projects include comedic performance for the stage and screen with Tara Jepsen, curating the monthly Porchlight Storytelling Series with Arline Klatte, and teaching creative writing to young adults. She played the female lead in Frazer Bradshaw s award-winning feature film Everything Strange and New and recently received a grant from the Creative Work Foundation to write a book about the developmentally disabled artists at Creativity Explored."
Review :
"The ultimate joyride for those of us who enjoy cringe-worthy embarrassment, genuine pathos, and an overdosing amount of schadenfreude."Michael Ian Black
"This book is fucking great."Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill and The Julie Ruin
"A strangely touching and engaging portrait of the artist as a young screwup."Booklist
"Yokohama Threeway blends the funny and the painful into an elixir more closely resembling cough medicine than soda popa little bitter, made up of strange ingredients, not real pretty, but necessary if you want to get better. In the end, you are happy you took it, even if it leaves a funky aftertaste."World Literature Today
"Speaking as someone who hates everything, I love this book."James Greer, musician & author of The Failure
"Hilarious, heartbreaking, compassionate, pitch perfect, utterly original."Joyce Maynard, author of After Her and Labor Day
"The book that had me laughing the hardest this year was Beth Lisick's Yokohama Threeway and Other Small Shames. The stories in this hilarious collection are naked and embarrassing and pure. But what I most appreciate about Lisick's storytelling is her brazen disregard for anything except verity. She's not interested in participating in the worldwide clever competition. No, Beth is all about the sloppy, topsy-turvy, warts-and-all truth. Acerbic, ignominious and terrifying at times, the stories told in this slim book always have the core of earnestness."Joshua Mohr, "Writers' favorite books of 2013," San Francisco Chronicle
"A laugh-out-loud series of short, revelatory confessions propelled by curiosity and an acute desire to experience the world. It is not now and perhaps never will be quite in vogue for people to share their shames, but Lisick does it with aplomb and even exuberance."Evan Karp, SF Weekly
"Beth Lisick's new essay collection Yokohama Threeway made me laugh out loud more than anything else I have read all year, she is a master at sharing her life experiences with self-deprecating yet honest humor."David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
"Beth Lisick, divulges the most embarrassing moments in a series of short essays dripping with wicked humor."7x7 Magazine "I laughed and cringed and cared more and more. Thank you, Beth Lisick, it was and continues to be worth all the struggles."Matthew Zapruder, author of Come On All You Ghosts
"No matter how civilized we all like to pretend we are, Lisick's writing reminds us how simultaneously wonderful and terrible it is to be alive. By baring her own 'Oh, no!' experiences, she shows us there is no shame in being human. Okay, a lot of shame. But at least it's funny shame."Kim Wong Keltner, author of Tiger Babies Strike Back
"The Sister Spit vet, known for her wry wit and bare-all honesty, spills some of the most embarrassing, cringe-worthy moments of her life. Hannah Horvath, meet your match."Out Magazine
"Beth Lisick recalls a litany of minor transgressions with humility, hilarity and incisive wit."Annie Atherton, Shelf Awareness Starred Review
"Lisick celebrates our uncanny ability to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and plod on. By making private abashment public, she pulls no punches. Indeed, by chuckling at life's whammies and zingers, she leaves us clamoring for more."Eleanor Bader, Review Fix
"Yokohama Threeway mixes equal parts of pain, humor, and honesty to deliver a short, fast, satisfying read. There are jokes, apologies, anecdotes, and confessions that range from the deeply personal to the universal and from the philosophical to the horrible. When you re ready to accept that you re as bad as the rest of us and take pleasure in the humiliation of others, pick this one up." Gabino Iglesias, Entropy
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"A laugh-out-loud series of short, revelatory confessions propelled by curiosity and an acute desire to experience the world. It is not now and perhaps never will be quite in vogue for people to share their shames, but Lisick does it with aplomb and even exuberance."--Evan Karp, "SF Weekly "
"Beth Lisick's new essay collection "Yokohama Threeway" made me laugh out loud more than anything else I have read all year, she is a master at sharing her life experiences with self-deprecating yet honest humor."--David Gutowski, Largehearted Boy
""Yokohama Threeway and Other Shames," by Porchlight cofounder Beth Lisick, divulges the author's most embarrassing moments in a series of short essays dripping with wicked humor.""--7x7 Magazine"
"These short pieces, which at first seem casually constructed and connected, are immediately funny, ironic, personable, embarrassing and oddly appealing. Yet quickly they accumulate into deep emotional resonance. Just a few pages in and I was totally involved with the struggles of this clearly talented, hilariously confused person to be better in her own weird antic backassward ways. Full of indelible phrases (Panda Ambulance!) and painfully irrefutable observations about art, crappy jobs, friendship, wealth, sex, hygiene, booze, motherhood, and so many other things, this book is basically the inverse of those sappy self-discovery memoirs that inevitably arc into hard earned wisdom and self-discovery. This writer has the courage to stay in difficult places, and therefore be truer to life. I laughed and cringed and cared more and more. Thank you, Beth Lisick, it was and continues to be worth all the struggles."--Matthew Zapruder, author of "Come On All You Ghosts"
""Yokohama Threeway "by Beth Lisick is a whip-smart, occasionally profound, often profane, always very funny collection of somewhere around three hundred (judged by weight) short, sharp, sweet literary shocks. Speaking as someone who hates everything, I lo
"These short pieces, which at first seem casually constructed and connected, are immediately funny, ironic, personable, embarrassing and oddly appealing. Yet quickly they accumulate into deep emotional resonance. Just a few pages in and I was totally involved with the struggles of this clearly talented, hilariously confused person to be better in her own weird antic backassward ways. Full of indelible phrases (Panda Ambulance!) and painfully irrefutable observations about art, crappy jobs, friendship, wealth, sex, hygiene, booze, motherhood, and so many other things, this book is basically the inverse of those sappy self-discovery memoirs that inevitably arc into hard earned wisdom and self-discovery. This writer has the courage to stay in difficult places, and therefore be truer to life. I laughed and cringed and cared more and more. Thank you, Beth Lisick, it was and continues to be worth all the struggles."--Matthew Zapruder, author of "Come On All You Ghosts"
""Yokohama Threeway" by Beth Lisick is a whip-smart, occasionally profound, often profane, always very funny collection of somewhere around three hundred (judged by weight) short, sharp, sweet literary shocks. Speaking as someone who hates everything, I love this book."--James Greer, musician and author of "The Failure"
"What to call Beth Lisick's "Yokohama Threeway?" Part flash fiction, part poetry, part outsider art. Reality television, minus the cameras. Spoon River Anthology meets Tom Waits. I'll settle for hilarious, heartbreaking, compassionate, pitch perfect, utterly original."--Joyce Maynard, author of "After Her" and "Labor Day"
