introducing: the runaway winner of the Most Personal Thing I Have Ever Put On The Internet contest!!! find this full review here if you dare: https://emmareadstoomuch.wordpress.com/2020/03/14/my-favorite-books-of-the-whole-year-only-3-months-late/

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At the end of 2014, I was in my junior year of high school, and I was in the deepest depression of my life. Before then and since, I’ve had bad days and dark spells, but none of it has ever been as bad as it was then.

In the winter going into 2015, I watched nine and a half seasons of the TV show Friends. I do not remember a single second of it. I would just go to school, get home, put Friends on, dissociate, go to sleep, repeat.

It was very bad. (The show, not the depression. I mean that was definitely not good, don’t get me wrong, but wow Friends is a very bad show.)

Even when I wasn’t watching possibly the least funny show that manages to call itself a comedy ever in the history of time, I was still on the internet. I don’t really know what I did - I don’t have many memories of that time of my life.

I know at some point during that time, I started listening to Serial. And something about the podcast format really clicked with me - maybe that I needed to do something else while I did it to stay focused. I don’t know. But it felt better than just putting garbage (and I do mean garbage) television on and staring at the wall.

Soon I started googling tons of podcast recommendation lists, which were really in a renaissance then. Honestly I think entertainment sites profited off of articles about podcasts more than podcasts profited off of podcasts. But anyway.

I saw one Vulture listicle on the best episodes of any podcast ever (isn’t it crazy that once upon a time there were few enough podcasts that that seemed possible? How times have changed), and it mentioned an episode of a show called Comedy Bang! Bang! that included a name I recognized: Bobby Moynihan, from SNL.

I listened to it. And I loved it so much. It made me actually smile, actually laugh, when that seemed kind of impossible.

I looked up more best episodes, and one name kept coming up: Harris Wittels.

I listened to every episode of CBB with him on it. I read his Twitter feed. I looked up his standup. He quickly became one of my favorite comedians, at a time when my favorite comedians were, like, SNL cast members.

I listened to an episode of Pete Holmes’ podcast where he was the guest, and he talked for hours about his addiction to heroin.

Then, in February 2015, after just a month or two of him being an unexpected beacon of joy and laughter in what felt like my impossible-to-live life, he died.

I don’t know Harris. I wasn’t his biggest fan or his most ardent follower. But he meant a lot to me, and his death hit me hard.

I’ve listened to and relistened to his podcast appearances, watched his Vine compilations repeatedly, trawled his Twitter feed. I’ve seen Parks & Rec (which he wrote for and guested on) over and over, have fawned over the brilliance of Master of None (in which his role would have been immense, just weeks after his death).

I’ve consumed a lot more comedy since I was 17, and become a lot happier, but Harris has never stopped meaning a lot to me.

I’ve known this book was coming out since Stephanie Wittels Wachs promoted it on Comedy Bang! Bang!, and I’ve had it on my to-read list ever since, but I’ve never felt ready to read it.

I knew it was going to make me very, very sad. Cry-level sad, which is ordinarily an impossibly high level of sadness for me to reach.

But reach it I did.

This is the single most heart-wrenching book I have ever read. Never has a page carried emotion like these ones did. It is real and raw and breathtakingly sad and somehow, still, funny.

I read it, for the most part, in a day, swaths of it in public (yes, weepily). I stayed up till 2 a.m. to finish it. This is the first book to make me feel like I had to do that in a very long time. It was that level of unputdownable.

My heart hurt the whole time. Stephanie Wittels Wachs is a brilliant writer. I felt this so hard (and I’m not a reader who feels hard constantly or easily).

Like Harris, it’s a f*cking amazing, once-in-a-lifetime thing.

I feel so lucky to have picked it up. And so glad I finally did.

Even though doing so the day before my birthday made me spend it in a serious state of melancholy.

Bottom line: Do not miss out on Harris Wittels, and do not miss out on this book.

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this was everything i hoped it would be and more.

review to come / 5 stars

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reading this book (which i absolutely know beyond a shadow of a doubt will make me cry) in public is my version of living on the edge.

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rip harris wittels, who died way too young three years ago today.

f*ck heroin.