I didn’t expect a book with chapter titles like “Nothing’s Funnier Than Naked” and “Welcome to Ass Planet” to make me tear up on public transit, but Lillian Stone’s Everybody’s Favorite: Tales From the World’s Worst Perfectionist accomplished this feat. Amid the bodily humor, cringey anecdotes, and irreverent one-liners, the Chicago-based comedy author and reporter writes with raw honesty and astute insights about experiences that I find deeply relatable as a fellow millennial woman who grew up Evangelical in flyover country.
Everybody’s Favorite: Tales From the World’s Worst Perfectionist by Lillian Stone
Dey Street Books, hardcover, 224 pp., $27.99, harpercollins.com
In this new essay collection, Stone addresses body image, mental health, 90s and aughts pop culture, misadventures in dating and pet parenthood, disaster prepping, navigating early-career jobs, and moving from her midsize Ozarks hometown to Chicago. Throughout, she writes about her efforts to overcome a strong tendency toward people-pleasing, or, in her words, a life mission “to be everything to everyone, all the time.”
Stone’s prose is bitingly funny and not for squeamish or pearl-clutching types. Consider her rewrite of a popular Christian poem, often found on kitschy decorations in the likes of Hobby Lobby. After relating a mortifying incident that involved assisting her mom with some intimate, pre-sunbathing hygiene, she writes, “I didn’t even make it to the beach that day. . . . It’s just like Christ said: When you saw only one set of footprints in the sand, it’s because I was in the shower, hosing off my mom’s pubes.” Reader, I snort-laughed.
Courtesy Harper Collins
Or take the mini-chapter titled, “An Evening of Carnal Delights as Envisioned by My Ten-Year-Old Self,” one of several interludes in which Stone deviates from memoir-style essay and experiments with form. In this example, she imagines her 32-year-old self in a steamy encounter with her ideal lover—Orlando Bloom in full costume as Legolas—which is cut tragically short when she shows her elfin beau the purity ring she has worn for decades. After she tearfully explains that she is saving herself for marriage, the literal and figurative climax comes when Bloom reveals his own silver band that reads, “LOVE WAITS.”
On a more serious note, Stone frankly shares her experiences with obsessive-compulsive disorder, a condition that was misdiagnosed for years and exacerbated by her religious upbringing. “My neurological concerns ensured that my entire existence was already dictated by fear; fear-based Evangelical teachings made that worse,” she writes. “I ditched the church, but I kept the fear. I’ve lost the fear of Hell, but I have plenty of other irrational fears.”
In one especially moving essay, “Beware the Howler,” Stone examines her affectionate yet complicated feelings about her “weird” hometown of Springfield, Missouri, which she left behind for Chicago at age 24. “You can critique a thing and still love it, I think,” she muses. As many young adults have found after periods of personal change and growth in a new city, going home to a “place that feels somehow suspended in Jell-O” can be fraught with tension. “I go back and back to the fiendish mountains of my childhood, wanting them to be proud of me, but knowing that I’ve grown into something they maybe wouldn’t like,” she writes.
Stone’s essays on body image, fitness, and the beauty industry may not offer the most novel critiques of the misogyny that women face from girlhood on, but she relates her own journey through the minefields of body shame with her signature candor. “When we finally get honest about our bodies—the good along with the gross, as if the two could possibly be assessed separately—we learn that there are no good bodies and no bad bodies; only bodies,” she writes. “All different, all normal. All gleefully disgusting.”
While much of the book interweaves bawdy jokes with serious subject matter, “The Poor Woman’s Steve Irwin” is altogether lighter fare, introducing several of the misfit animals that Stone has taken in over the years—from a vengeful Boston terrier named Olive to a screaming beagle named Archie. (She introduced her other Boston terrier, Turtle, in the Reader.) “I’m always getting stuck with the most problematic members of the animal kingdom,” she writes. “I’d like to blame it on my naturally charitable nature—give me your tired, your poor, your huddled terriers yearning to release an Uno Attack-style stream of feces in the TJ Maxx home decor section—but I think there’s just something weak in my nature that attracts these creatures.”
Whether or not readers catch all the references aimed at millennials and former church kids, Everybody’s Favorite will appeal to fans of humor writing, memoirs, and social commentary that doesn’t take itself too seriously. Don’t be fooled by the hot pink-and-yellow jacket, complete with a sparkly scrunchie and a rainbow of gel pens—some eloquent nuggets of wisdom are found within, along with enough embarrassing stories to ensure that no one will ever be able to blackmail the author.
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