Paul Feig: You Had Me At Page One

Kick Me:
Adventures in Adolescence
by Paul Feig
p. 2002

Needing a mood turnaround after the stark writing of Richard Yates, I quickly picked up a book I knew would cheer me up—because I’d read it already. I haven’t picked up Paul Feig’s creative non-fiction style memoirs, Kick Me, since a copy was loaned to me by a friend in high school, but large parts of it came back to me as I read it for the second time—and even though it wasn’t my first time absorbing his hilarious style of reminiscing, I still found myself having to put the book down by the fourth page in because I was laughing too hard.

The first chapter of Paul Feig’s memoirs, dealing with his early childhood into adolescence and rounding out with his teenage years, focuses on the cruel nicknames bestowed upon Feig as a boy, the first being “Fig Newton” which gradually evolved into a harsher, more obvious twist on his unfortunate surname a few years later. Grade school notoriety aside, Paul Feig’s is a name largely unknown still, but it shouldn’t be. I’ve been following Feig for a few years after discovering he hailed from my very own hometown, Royal Oak, Michigan, but he’s since moved on to bigger things, boasting writing credits for the cult TV show “Freaks and Geeks,” “Arrested Development,” “The Office,” and 2011’s box office hit, “Bridesmaids,” among other things. He even has a few acting credits under his belt, and though none of them are really ‘breakout roles’, my high school self was shocked and amused to find out he portrayed token skinny camp counselor Tim from one of my favorite childhood movies, “Heavyweights.”

Paul Feig may not be a household name, but he should be, because his honest, self-deprecating, sarcastic sense of humor is very catching. He’s more than two decades my senior, of the opposite gender, and much more outgoing than I ever was, but his cringe-worthy stories of adolescent awkwardness are startlingly accessible no matter who you are. And Feig relates the details of his anecdotes with such clarity that you can easily picture them... which often sends you into another bout of hysterical giggling at poor Feig’s expense. All in his plan, though, I’m sure. Everyone loves a joker, and if you can’t laugh at yourself then you’re all the poorer for it.

When I read Kick Me the first time, I wasn’t familiar with the term, but upon retrospection, Feig’s first book definitely falls under the category of “creative nonfiction” an emerging genre that appeals to me, as it offers up a literary spin on the memoir genre. Kick Me isn’t a straight up set of memoirs detailing Feig’s life from birth to present, it is a story, or rather a collection of short stories that sum up the universal experience of youth. If it can be said that Kick Me has overarching themes that guide it to its logical conclusion, it would be that kids can be cruel, because they don’t understand, but that as you grow and look back, all those things you stressed over when you were ten don’t seem so bad when you’re thirty, so relax, let go of your angst, and just learn to enjoy the roller coaster of adolescence.

I had another motive for finally picking up Kick Me, aside from the fact that it had been collecting dust on my shelf for years. Feig wrote a follow up to his first novel, Superstud: Or How I Became A 24-Year-Old Virgin, which I can only assume follows the same format, and I’ve been wanting to read it ever since I found out about it, just hadn’t gotten around to it yet. I will be trying out Superstud in a much more timely fashion than it took me to reread Kick Me, I am sure.

I urge anybody to pick up this book and dive in headfirst. Paul Feig is just too funny to pass up, and someone you’d very much like to befriend after his tour of his gawky youth. That he took that showy awkwardness and turned it into a lucrative career is as admirable as it is fitting.