Superstud: Adventures in Embarrassment Empathy

Superstud
Or How I Became a 24-year-old Virgin
by Paul Feig
p. 2005


Here is a term I have just invented to describe my feelings about this book:
Embarrassment Empathy - when you're just so embarrassed for a character on page or screen that you have to hide your face until it's over because it's all too much to bear. (For TV fans, this may also be referred to as The Michael Scott Effect)

Superstud is the follow up to Paul Feig’s first autobiographical novel, Kick Me. Like Kick Me, it revolves around the comically awkward and often cringeworthy aspects of growing up that we all unfortunately experience. Feig, a native of my very own Royal Oak, Michigan, holds a special place in my heart, but I would have read this pair of novels regardless, as Feig’s is a career I have followed my entire adolescence, whether I realized it or not.

Superstud follows a lot of the patterns that its predecessor used, in that each chapter reads like its own anecdotal short story, but may be referenced in later chapters. I still laughed out loud, I still felt appropriately horrified at teenage Paul’s social missteps, and I still resonated with his awkwardness, but on the whole, I wasn’t as impressed with Feig’s sophomore novel as I was with Kick Me. Perhaps it was because Superstud covers the teenage to young adult portion of Feig’s youth as opposed to the earlier years. Watching someone stumble and fail hilariously is a lot easier to handle when they are a kid who probably doesn’t realize what they’re doing; watching that person repeat their mistakes on into young adulthood is so much worse because now you know they probably realize everything they’re doing wrong and still can’t get it together. I found myself cringing and sinking my face into my hands a lot more while reading Superstud than I did reading Kick Me. It just felt too uncomfortably aligned with my own awkward adolescence.

The content was a bit more alienating to me this time around, as nearly a third of the novel focuses on Feig’s misadventures in teenage masturbation and accidental boners, which I understandably lack familiarity with. It was a bit much, and all right up front, as the entire first section of the book is named after it, but I suppose male readers would find the whole ordeal a lot funnier than I would.

There were also some stylistic choices I thought fell a bit flat, namely Feig’s narration of finally losing his virginity, which is written out as if they are biblical passages. I got the intention, but I wasn’t feeling it the way it was written and got a bit tired of it a couple pages in.

That said, Feig’s super awkward comedy of errors that made up his youth would translate really well to the big screen. Someone really ought to snatch these books up and make a comedic film out of them. I’d watch it (even if I had to hide my face to bear the embarrassment empathy) because Feig’s torment is just too relatable, and if you can’t look back on that awkwardness and laugh about it (and Feig certainly has no problem doing this, as evidenced by his bare all attitude) then you’re gonna have a hard time moving forward.