Maeve in America

Description

“If Tina Fey and David Sedaris had a daughter, she would be Maeve Higgins.” —Glamour

A startlingly hilarious essay collection about one woman’s messy path to finding her footing in New York City, from breakout comedy star and podcaster Maeve Higgins

Maeve Higgins was a bestselling author and comedian in her native Ireland when, at the grand old age of thirty-one, she left the only home she’d ever known in search of something more and found herself in New York City. Together, the essays in Maeve in America create a smart, funny, and revealing portrait of a woman who aims for the stars but sometimes hits the ceiling and the inimitable city that helped make her who she is.

Here are stories of not being able to afford a dress for the ball, of learning to live with yourself while you’re still figuring out how to love yourself, of the true significance of realizing what sort of shelter dog you would be. Self-aware and laugh-out-loud funny, this collection is also a fearless exploration of the awkward questions in life, such as: Is clapping too loudly at a gig a good enough reason to break up with somebody? Is it ever really possible to leave home?

“Maeve Higgins is hilarious, poignant, conversational, and my favorite Irish import since U2. You’re in for a treat.” —Phoebe Robinson“If Tina Fey and David Sedaris had a daughter, she would be Maeve Higgins. (And while I’m building the fantasy family of comedy, let’s put Nora Ephron somewhere on the family tree.) Higgins’s essays cover subjects ranging from what kind of shelter dog she would be to emigrating from Ireland, but a single thread weaves through each one: that elusive feeling of laughing around a big lump in your throat.”
—Glamour (The Best Books to Read This Summer)

“Sharp-eyed . . . deeply funny and astute.”
—People (The Best New Books)

“Hilarious . . . Maeve in America lives up to the hype. It’s chock-a-block full of personal tales of both success and failure, all told with that elusive combination of self-deprecation and grandeur.”
—Entertainment Weekly

“One of the most charming exports to the American comedy scene is Irish writer Maeve Higgins. . . . Higgins’s vibe [is] wary but hopeful, clever but earnest. [The] sensibility [that] runs through: deep empathy and genuine curiosity about the American experience of newcomers . . . with more Michael Fassbender jokes, and a bit more self-deprecating humor (stop, Maeve, you’re perfect).”
—Maris Kreizman, Vulture (New Paperbacks You Should Read This August)

“[A beach read] that is actually beach appropriate.”
—New York Magazine (The Approval Matrix: Brilliant)

“[An] ingenious collection of essays that examine the personal and the political, offering an incredible outsider’s view of America’s current cultural climate and its place within the world. . . . Higgins’s insightful and wacky essays will not only make you laugh; you’ll also nod in recognition and sigh in solidarity. . . . It’s her outsider’s perspective that makes her commentary of current day America so unique and critical at a time when migrants and immigrants are fighting to have their voices heard.”
—Esquire (The Best Books of 2018 (So Far))

“Celebrate the person who stands out from the crowd with [this] memoir from [a] self-described outsider: Maeve in America, Maeve Higgins’s hilarious essay collection about leaving Ireland in her thirties, and finding herself in New York.”
—Buzzfeed (The Best Books From 2018 For Every Kind Of Reader)

“Maeve turns her wise eye toward our culture in witty, relatable essays.”
—Good Housekeeping

“Maeve in America will provide the laughter to soothe your soul. . . . Maeve Higgins is funny. So funny you will laugh multiple times while reading each of these essays, replete with uncanny imagery and off-the-wall situations. So funny that, at 31, she was confident enough in her career as an Irish comic to make it in America. Higgins expertly threads important social commentary amid the hilarity. Maeve in America is a satisfying essay collection that is as stimulating as it is funny. It’s a great book to read and then to give to a friend.”
—Refinery29 (Get Excited About These Amazing August Reads)

“Higgins’s essays are a fun romp that are perfect summer reading.”
—Bustle

“Upbeat and funny . . . The chapters are short and spunky . . . like a collection of Snapchat Stories that you can keep forever.”
—BUST

“Anyone who delves into the compulsively readable Maeve in America would surely pronounce [Higgins’s] abilities extraordinary enough to game any visa system, no matter how flawed.”
—Fast Company

“Wickedly funny . . . with incisive humor and deep humility . . . Higgins has the rare gift of being able to meaningfully engage with politics and social ills while remaining legitimately funny.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Sharp and readable . . . A keen observer of culture, [Maeve Higgins] offers timely insights about race and immigration in America. . . . Witty, humane, and topical, these essays offer an enlightened perspective on modern American culture while probing the energetic inner life of a bright young Irish comic. A warmly intelligent and insightful collection.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“Prepare to laugh as comedian Maeve Higgins shares tales of an Irish girl in New York . . . with humor and flair. Higgins is a smart essayist, providing thoughtful insights, and you can tell she cares deeply about her subjects. . . . She deftly balances humor and gravitas. . . . Maeve Higgins may not be a household name yet, but she certainly has some things to say.”
—Booklist

“If this is your first time reading Maeve Higgins, I’m jealous. She’s hilarious, poignant, conversational, and my favorite Irish import since U2. You’re in for a treat.”
—Phoebe Robinson, New York Times bestselling author of You Can’t Touch My Hair

“Maeve Higgins is hilarious. She is the true Irish voice of our American generation.”
—Amy Schumer

“Maeve Higgins is brilliant; but her brilliance isn’t the braggy, headlight kind that tries to trap her subjects deer-like in a cold, dead glare. Instead, she lights every room she enters with warmth, welcome, and generous rays of sheer funny. And in this book, she illuminates the world.”
—John Hodgman, bestselling author of Vacationland

“Maeve Higgins is easily one of my favorite, most treasured comedic voices. She is one of those rare artists who makes her unique point of view relatable and refreshing, leaving you feeling like you’ve been on the same page with her your whole life.”
—Kristen Schaal

“Until space aliens land in America, Maeve Higgins from Ireland is the next best thing. She offers fresh and insightful perspectives from a faraway place on all we take for granted.”
—Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Maeve Higgins is the funniest writer I know. And Maeve in America is just so smart and joyful. I especially like it when she’s unhappy. Because she’s very funny about it. Always be unhappy, Maeve!”
—Jon Ronson, author of So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed

“This is a really funny, really natural, really gifted writer.”
—Kevin Barry, author of Beatlebone and City of Bohane

“Higgins is rarer than a blessing of unicorns. . . . She is original and relatively calm, her observations are pithy, her wit delicate, her persona oddly alluring and deftly honest.”
—The Irish TimesMaeve Higgins is a contributing writer for The New York Times and the host of the hit podcast Maeve in America: Immigration IRL. She is a comedian who has performed all over the world, including in her native Ireland, Edinburgh, Melbourne, and Erbil. Now based in New York, she cohosts Neil deGrasse Tyson’s StarTalk, both the podcast and the TV show on National Geographic, and has also appeared on Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer and on WNYC’s 2 Dope Queens.I am addicted to Instagram, specifically Instagram Stories. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, please bear with me; for your understanding of what follows, it’s not necessary to share my addiction. In fact, it could well be better if you don’t, for your own sake. Or perhaps not. Shall we see? Stories is a feature on Instagram that successfully mimics Snapchat, where you can post as many videos and photos as you like, with any number of filters, stickers, and text, and it doesn’t show up on your main feed. So, as Instagram says, “You don’t have to worry about over-posting.” A Story lasts twenty-four hours, then it disappears forever.

In August, I visited Ireland for my sister’s wedding. In the run- up to it, my father celebrated his birthday and I was playing a comedy festival in Dublin. Lovely occasions, all: celebrations, family time, and reliving memories of home. Before I left for Dublin, I was extremely excited about making the trip. Not because of homesickness, or a love of work, or even the chance to escape the sticky heat of a New York summer. All I could think about was the content.

I caught myself grinning in bed one night, imagining the quality and quantity of content those occasions would generate. I suddenly felt grotesque, focusing so hard on the material I could glean for social media from what should really be a lovely private vacation. My grin dropped, until a moment later when I successfully brushed my qualms aside by picturing toddlers on bouncy castles. Adorable! I could film them in “rewind” mode, making them look like superheroes with pigtails! And it would be good for showing off my work stuff too, the festival shots. I envisioned the hyped crowds of people waving in sequence as I snapped a photo of them from the stage. I’d look like a stadium performer, the Springsteen of hesitant observational comedy.

All of that would come along and be picked clean and fed to my phone even before the big day itself, and there would definitely be stunning shots from that, I mean, my wedding day, my big day, the day I’d always dreamed of! Excuse me, I beg your pardon, I meant to say my sister’s big day. Either way, there would be tearful speeches, heavenly food and sweet little flower girls.

And I was determined that there would be at least one glorious image of me on the wedding day itself, in my wedding dress, as in the floaty pale pink dress I was wearing for the wedding, looking adorable and ephemeral, like a healthy fairy. The dress was actually a little too close to my skin tone for comfort, but I knew I could play with the contrast and filters before I posted it. I knew I could make it all look perfect.

Perfection, when contrived, is laughable. Instagram is easy to dismiss for the way it flattens and fluffs. I’m happy to put up with accusations of vanity, though, to put something beautiful out there in the ether. Besides, I go for perfection in my posts, fun in my Stories, and that’s my clunky motto. Perhaps because they disappear, the Stories people post tend to be more spontaneous, more silly, and definitely more enthralling than regular videos. There’s a comedian I know a little, and every day I see their little Mexican hairless dog trembling in anticipation of a walk; I watch Chance the Rapper’s baby girl learn to count; and I see what my sister Lilly is making for lunch. Stories are hypnotic, endless tiny glimpses into peoples’ homes and heads. To stitch them all together into one big quilt to wrap myself in would surely answer every question I have about who we are and why we’re here. This is what I’ve been looking for, I think, rapt, as I lie dead-still in my bed, tapping the snooze button on my alarm for the fourth time that morning.

I’m cautious of this addiction, and of this belief that a new piece of technology can allow me into the secret lives of others, because I’ve fallen in love like this before only to see it all fall to pieces. For a brief few weeks during a comedy festival in Melbourne in 2010, I got completely hooked on Chatroulette. Still in its first year, this chat website randomly connected users to each other so they could chat over video. The Russian teenager who created it, Andrey Ternovskiy, named it Chatroulette because of that scene in The Deer Hunter, where prisoners of war are forced to play Russian roulette. That note should probably have signaled how it would all end up, a game of chance with terrible consequences. In this case, while I never blew my head off, I certainly saw many, many headless men masturbating.

But there was a sweet spot just before that happened that lasted at least those few weeks I spent captivated in a Melbourne hotel room, flashing through portals into other worlds. When people who didn’t share a language were connected, we could still smile and wave or conduct impromptu puppet shows. I was randomly connected to a German couple having a dance party with their friends, a teenager in Florida who wanted to talk about legal drinking ages, and an architect in Israel who carried his laptop outside to his veranda so we could see the sunset together. It felt like a real human connection, albeit through code.

Soon enough, though, the curious ones, us chatty ones interested in connecting, we were outnumbered. Click after click became dick after dick. Like most of the Internet, Chatroulette soon got overwhelmed by all the dicks, and women, who were less likely to venture on there in the first place, almost completely stopped visiting. Instagram feels much safer, although of course there’s a price to pay for that, with their standards that ban female nipples and their ever-increasing number of advertisers barreling through my feed. For now, Instagram and Stories have restored for me a place to join in, to span time and geography and connect with others as we all express ourselves in whichever way we see fit, as long as we don’t show our nipples.

Before I left, my therapist asked me how I planned to deal with all the feelings a trip to Ireland evokes in me. A visit home typically presents me with a real smorgasbord of emotions. I feel guilt for leaving, regret at old failures there, joy at being in a place so familiar, and love for my people and my misty little country. These feelings generally mix in together to create some kind of phantasm that blurs up on me and swallows me whole at the arrivals gate in Dublin Airport. I answered my therapist immediately. “Ummm, maybe I will just stack those feelings up and organize them when I’m back?” We smiled and bowed at each other slightly, as we always do when I make some kind of corny joke to buy time, and I sighed. “I suppose I’ll steer clear of alcohol and I’ll write down my feelings and express myself the best I can in the moment I’m feeling something.” Expressing my feelings in the moment as best I could? I didn’t know it then, but Instagram helped me to do just that.

I walked through the streets of Dublin, feeling like a weird ghost myself, because me and those streets, we know each other well, but I’m not there anymore. I lived there, in five different homes, for twelve years. Now I don’t have a home there. The redbrick buildings on South Great Georges Street are still standing; the unchanged smell of peeled eggs and coffee wafts out of Simon’s Place, where I used to sit with my first boyfriend; the national broadcaster still plays the Angelus bells at midday; and the same man with bright blue eyes sits begging on Wicklow Street. There should be a word for what feels like déjà vu but for when you actually have experienced the situation before. Memory isn’t the right one. Memories are what I have when I’m away. There is something physical that happens, something more than a memory that crowds in when I’m back there again. I try to document it. I capture the sound of the church bells, the metallic blue of the River Liffey, and the steam from the hot cup of tea I pour on my first morning back, and I put them all on my Instagram Story. I’m saying, Can you see this? All of this is still here, and now I am back here too.

The best functions of this feature are the ones that are missing. There are no likes and no shares—the usual call-and-response reward system that goes with most forms of social media is gone. When I use Stories, I feel less like those laboratory rats who keep pressing a button for more cocaine. Which is nice. I wonder how much longer the feature will last; it’s existed since August 2016 and has grown to over 250 million users in a year. It is increasingly filling up with advertisements that snap me out of my reverie as I watch other peoples’ Stories, causing me to huffily close the app altogether.

Of course, I open it again soon after. I scroll through my friends’ Stories back in New York. There was a double rainbow in Williamsburg and most of them captured it. I love to think of them all taking a second to look up and do that. The guy I’d just started dating had a Story up: pretty standard fare of trees swaying and his cat looking pissed off with a cone around her neck. He must have gotten her spayed, praise be. For a second I’m back on his bed, listening as he explains, haltingly, that she gets so horny, and loud about it, he has to rock her hips to “calm her down.” And in that second I’m horrified and impressed all over again at this man who loves his cat so much he’ll help her masturbate. I wonder idly if he bothers to check who has watched his Story. I often check, although when over a thousand people have, it’s hard to keep track. The ability to see a list of names of people who have watched your stories is an intriguing feature. It is very satisfying for the imaginative among us—I know that my busy little brain whirs to make sense of it all. Why is he watching, is she showing someone else, what will they all think of me now? Sometimes, before I post, I need to stop and check: Are these thirst traps? Some photos, some videos, am I hoping they will set in motion some kind of tryst, like perhaps I’m “tryna fuck,” as my young friends would say? Yes, sometimes, but mostly this is bigger than some low-level neediness. I am sending these out to the world, anyone, anyone, anyone there? These images are me trying to say, to anyone who cares to look, this is what it’s like, this is who I am.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.7000 × 5.0600 × 7.7100 in
Imprint	Penguin Books
ISBN-13	09780143130161
ISBN-10	0143130161
Author	Maeve Higgins
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	BIO026000, SOC041000
Subjects	amy schumer, funny books, comedian, autobiography, immigrant, biographies, essays, memoirs, books for women, humorous books for adults, funny gifts, Irish, autobiographies, essay collection, political books, biographies of famous people, relationship books, sociology books, funny books for women, biographies and memoirs, hooking up, romance, feminism, immigration, BIO026000, relationships, resistance, biography, movie, Memoir, actress, comedy, history, American, Friendship, SOC041000, Sociology, podcast, humor, friends, brooklyn, New York City