Congratulations, The Best Is Over!

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The beloved author of “How is it possible that I liked this book even more than his last one? Phenomenal.”--Jenny Lawson, A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, After going viral “reading” the chaotic political news, having one-too-many awkward social encounters, and coming to terms with his intersecting identities, R. Eric Thomas finally knew who he was and where he was going. He was living his best life. But then everything changed. In this collection of insightful and hilarious essays, Thomas moves back to his perpetually misunderstood hometown of Baltimore (a place he never wanted to return, even to be buried) and behaves completely out of character. They say you can’t go home again, but what if you and home have changed beyond recognition? From attending his twenty-year high school reunion and discovering another person’s face on his name badge, to splattering an urgent care room with blood à la With wit, heart, and hope for the future, <Congratulations, The Best Is Over!< is the not-so-gentle reminder we all need that even when life doesn’t go according to plan, we can still find our way back home.

Autorentext
R. Eric Thomas is the bestselling author of&#160;Here for It: Or,&#160;How to Save Your Soul in America,&#160;a&#160;Lambda Literary Award finalist; and the YA novel&#160;Kings of B’more,&#160;a Stonewall Honor book. Both&#160;books were also&#160;featured as Read with Jenna book club picks on&#160;Today. He is also a television writer (Apple TV+’s&#160;Dickinson,&#160;FX’s&#160;Better Things), a Lambda Literary Award–winning playwright, and the long-running host of the Moth in Philadelphia. For four years, Thomas was a senior staff writer at&#160;Elle online,&#160;where&#160;he wrote the popular “Eric Reads the News” column.

Zusammenfassung
How is it possible that I liked this book even more than his last one? Phenomenal. Jenny Lawson, New York Times bestselling author of Broken (in the best possible way)

I occasionally read another writer s work overcome with equal parts delight and raging envy, and thus my reaction to R. Eric Thomas. How dare he! Congratulations, The Best Is Over! is some of his best work. The gay frogs story sent me so hard, I had to stop reading it on the plane. But then, like he does, other sections are beautifully fragile, so human and tender and dear. Read this book and thank me later. Jen Hatmaker, New York Times bestselling author of Fierce, Free, and Full of Fire

Congratulations, The Best Is Over! is like having a late-night chat with your best friend in book form: all at once vulnerable, cuttingly funny, and ultimately life-affirming. R. Eric Thomas has written a book that will make you laugh, cry, and maybe even crack your heart open as he shares his hard-won and hilarious wisdom. Tara Schuster, author of Glow in the Fcking Dark*

R. Eric Thomas is a once-in-a-lifetime voice. Funny, insightful, and hopeful, Congratulations, The Best Is Over! is a profound meditation on what it means to come home, and on finding your way again after the chaos of life takes you off your path. John Paul Brammer, author of ¡Hola Papi!**

Congratulations, The Best Is Over! is as thoughtful and poignant as it is funny and it is very, very funny. I can t remember the last time a book made me laugh out loud on just about every page while also moving me to tears. R. Eric Thomas is one of my favorite writers. Read this book, and he ll be one of yours, too. Nicole Chung, author of A Living Remedy

R. Eric Thomas finds hilarity in the quotidian adulthood, marriage, suburbia, and even death amid an unexpected, mid-life relocation back to Maryland. Chronicling his efforts to establish a new normal in an old home with irreverence, warmth, and laugh-out-loud social commentary, Thomas showcases a narrative voice that is anything but mundane. Dr. Eric Cervini, bestselling author of The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. The United States of America

The unfailingly entertaining essays burst with personality and amount to a full-fleshed portrait of all the beauty and difficulty of coming home again. This tender memoir captivates. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

The bestselling author of Here for It pens another hilarious and thoughtful essay collection. . . . A funny, poignant, astute collection. ***Kirkus Reviews* (starred review)

Hilarious and insightful . . . Highlighting the power of reinvention at any age, [R. Eric] Thomas s writing encourages all to enjoy the chaos and the magic of the present. *Booklist***

[Thomas is] fun, funny, vulnerable and one hell of a storyteller. BookPage

Leseprobe
This Is Wudder

The appeal of the building was that it had an infinity pool and that it was situated next to the Jones Falls, a bucolic eighteen-mile stream that runs through Baltimore along I-83. Those were the things they were selling. The apartments were handsomely designed, carved out of the shell of an old sailcloth factory that later made model trains and dolls that were at least 40 percent haunted. It was an award-winning green-energy building that had preserved many of the original features, like huge wooden beams that crisscrossed throughout the floors. There was a common room in the middle of the third floor that had a computer workstation, a big TV, and a few couches for gathering.

Imagine yourself watching the Super Bowl here while drinking a nice cold beer! the leasing agent declared to me and my husband, David, when our tour reached the common room. And then she just stared at me as I desperately tried to force my brain to generate any of those images. There s also a gym you can use anytime, day or night, she said.

Please, I replied, I m having an aneurysm.

The selling points, however, were the pool, which was only about the size of two picnic tables but apparently went on infinitely, and the Falls, which attracted herons and geese and provided a peaceful view augmented by the dulcet sounds of highway traffic.

I could be happy here, I said to David, which is a deranged kind of promise but also just a statement of fact. It was 2017 and we were currently living in Philadelphia, where, as a matter of fact, I was incredibly happy. I hadn t lived in Baltimore for going on thirteen years at that point. I d hightailed it to New York for college, but after dropping out, I crash-landed back at my parents house. Those years in Baltimore had been hard. I waited tables at a comedy club humorlessly, I came out to myself and the world in lurching fits and starts, I accidentally got myself canceled writing for a local college s newspaper. The usual catastrophic coming-of-age.

At the time, HBO was shooting the television series The Wire in my parents redlined neighborhood, which felt simultaneously glamorous and demoralizing. I put a placard outside my bedroom window that read filming location for a modern American tragedy. My parents had gone to great lengths to create a world of possibility in our house when I was growing up, but the outside world of the neighborhood was resolutely without hope. Abandoned by avaricious landlords and the elected officials supposedly representing it, the neighborhood may have been defined onscreen by the pervasive influence of drugs and violence, but the real story was of a people who were never afforded any options. While living there after college, I struggled to craft a better narrative for myself, let alone the city. Was such a thing even possible for me a Black college dropout, a gay man whose conservative religious upbringing promised damnation, a failure?

Moving away had given me the chance to write another narrative, but it had also calcified my complicated feelings about my hometow…