Does This Make Me Funny?: Essays

Girls star Mamet (My First Popsicle), the self-proclaimed “nepito baby” of playwright David Mamet and actor Lindsay Crouse, delivers a series of intimate, funny, and sometimes harrowing vignettes focused on show business and self-worth. On the darker side, Mamet details her challenges with anorexia and persistent body image issues, her strained relationship with an alcoholic teenage boyfriend, her loneliness from growing up as a perpetual outcast, and the relentless grind of trying to fulfill her acting ambitions. She juxtaposes those trials with humorous, celeb-studded memories of her first meeting with David Sedaris, losing a jacket to Axl Rose, and the pneumonia-stricken audition that landed her the role of Shoshanna in Girls (a character she wishes she could text). There’s more heft here than in standard-issue showbiz memoirs: Mamet’s struggles with self-doubt and self-definition resonate, and her jokes land more like attempts at maintaining good humor in the face of a cruel world than pure silliness. This is a must for Girls fans, aspiring actors, and young women attempting to figure out who they are. Agent: Mel Flashman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (Sept.)