Kick Me: Adventures in Adolescence

Feig fully admits his neuroses and total cluelessness, yet I categorically refuse to believe that one person could have suffered so many mishaps, indignities, bullying, and general embarrassment and lived to write about it. The contents of this book simply cannot be true -- but I don't care, 'cause it makes for great reading. Even though a number of the episodes are total cliches (the dodgeball game in which everyone gangs up on him, the horrific first gym group shower, the parents to cheap to get him a proper Christmas pageant costume, the horror of the CPR dummy, Little League ineptitude), Feig manages to make them funny all over again.

This is a great book for any guy who looks back at their youth with distress at their inability to charm the ladies. No one does it worse than Feig: Childhood crush wants to kiss you? Play coy until she gets bored. Crush on cute girl in homeroom? Give her a family heirloom as gift and watch the confusion on her face as she tries to work out who you are. Crush on classmate? Tell tasteless joke comparing teacher to simian and watch her report you. Somehow manage to score a date with a cute, fun-loving chick? Recoil all night in disgust from her beer breath and deliver the worst good-night kiss of all time. The book ends on a great note, as Feig takes his childhood playmate, the girl next door, to the prom and discovers something unexpected.

However, the best stories are the ones that don't fit into the usual categories. My favorite one where he writes about the forbidden childhood thrill of digging around in his WWII vet dad's closet and decides that hanging a Nazi flag in the front bay window is a good way to honor his father's service. Then there's his bizarre flirtation with cross-dressing, and his even more bizarre sexual awakening in the midst of gym rope climb. There's the terror of riding the school bus, and an ill advised stint as PA announced at the high school football game.

It's kind of an interesting read in the sense that Feig is so utterly clueless and harmless that you find yourself constantly rooting for him to get something right. But sometimes his own admitted issues, especially the germ phobia, make one unsympathetic to his plight. In any event, it's highly entertaining and likely to make almost every reader feel better about their own school days. Apparently he's written a sequel called Superstud, about his late teen and early adult years.


Worryingly funny   May 10, 2003
 2 out of 2 found this review helpful

Buying "Kick Me" for a long plane flight, I soon discovered this was a mistake as, before long, my fellow passengers were moving away from me and my ill-concealed snorts, giggles and out right hysterical laughter attacks. Paul Feig writes very well even though a lot of his material could stand alone in binary code. I am very worried if all of this actually took place to him- it makes me fear that what I thought was a normal childhood -i.e. free of homoerotic incidents in the changing rooms, being unmolested by a life-saving instructor, having intimate relationships with the climbing rope during P.E.- is actually one of extreme privelege. Buy this book if you like humour--- and aren't afraid of anything described graphically and with scary honesty...