Leora’s Pick
People. Read this book. Look, when I started reading Stay Up with Hugo Best, I was in one of those reading funks that makes you think you will never like a book again and you have to change your whole identity because who are you if you aren’t a reader. But then, both metaphorically and literally (I was on a plane), the clouds lifted. I couldn’t stop reading until I finished it, about twenty minutes into work the next morning. It’s incredibly rare that I can’t put down a book once I get to work—the hustle and the bustle of missed phone calls, urgent emails, and orders usually gets me out of reading mode. But this time around, something about this book made all of those things melt away. And, honestly, that’s the appeal of this book. It doesn’t shy away from the politics of the subject matter—the #metoo-esque environment, the inability to deal with or even understand the present-day government, the role of men (usually straight and white) in the changing entertainment industry—but Erin Somers somehow makes those aspects no more than background noise until she needs them to come to prominence. In the meantime, this book is fun, funny, and authentic to the experience of almost everyone—from aspiring millennials, hoping to make something special out of a relatively tame existence, to the aging man, desperately trying to avoid becoming a footnote in the history of “problematic men,” or worse, simply irrelevant. It’s almost rom-com-like in its ability to speak truth without weighting the reader down, but at the end of the book, you’re still left with a sense of heft, because you too have experienced the downfall of this straight, white man, but this time, he was too close to your heart to allow you to revel in it. Since reading it months and months ago, I have found that this book has only become more important and relevant. With our culture exposing more and more people who have created much of our cultural history, the question of how to separate art from artist is ever-present. Erin’s answer is clear and truly insightful: it’s not about the artist, it’s not about the art, it’s about the men who comment on a culture that inevitably tames them, destroys them, and changes them. And about this one woman who takes up the mantle to do the exact same thing, hoping for different results.
