Book Review

You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia Day

B

Genre: Memoir, Nonfiction

In her memoir, You’re Never Weird On The Internet (Almost), Felicia Day explains how being a weird person with a weird upbringing led to her weird and highly successful career as an actress, writer, and producer in the Internet world. It’s a cute, engaging memoir that sounds just like Felicia sounds in all her other endeavors – smart, self-deprecating, funny, and insecure. It’s also short and fairly superficial. Felicia shares some very personal things but she also leaves a lot of unanswered questions. The memoir is fun, and it has some important things to share, but it’s not terribly deep.

Day starts off by talking about her experiences with being homeschooled in Mississippi. While her homeschooling seems to have been pretty erratic, it worked, because at age 16 she was admitted into The University of Texas on a full scholarship because of her talents on the violin. She graduated with a 4.0 average and a double major in math and music. She talks about college as being awkward (her mom drove her her back and forth to school every day) but also exciting (she loved pushing herself to succeed). Day has a huge compulsion to be perfect in any endeavor – my favorite moment in the book was when one of her professors gently told her that if she got a B in his class, the rest of her life would be “so much easier.” Spoiler – she got an ‘A’ after all:

One semester later, I did, indeed, graduate with a 4.0. I had done it. And after that, my GPA did…

Nothing. I never planned on going to graduate school. I wasn’t applying for jobs that used grades as a measurement. I didn’t need that GPA for any single reason other than to SAY I had it and impress people.

I could turn this into an argument for “Let’s reward a high GPA after college in LIFE! Can we get priority seating on Southwest? A free monthly refill at Starbucks? SOMETHING to make four years of my life chasing this arbitrary number WORTH IT?!” (Great idea. Never gonna happen.) Or I could argue that if I’d been easier on myself and gotten 10 percent worse grades I could have had 50 percent more friendships and fun.

If someone’s takeaway from this story is “Felicia Day said don’t study!,” I’ll punch you in the face. But I AM saying don’t chase perfection for perfection’s sake, or for anyone else’s sake at all. If you strive for something, make sure it’s for the right reasons. And if you fail, that will be a better lesson for you than any success you’ll ever have. Because you learn a lot from screwing up.

Being perfect…not so much.

After college, Day pursued acting. During this time she developed an addiction to playing World of Warcraft. This period of time inspired her online show, The Guild. Much of the book deals with the development of the show, the impact it had on her career and her goals, and her struggles with severe anxiety and depression.

Your feelings about You’re Never Weird… are going to depend pretty much entirely on your feelings about Felicia Day. She has what TV Tropes calls an adorkable personality, which some people find grating and others find irresistible. Her book fits the same tone that Felicia fans will be used to from following her online – self-deprecating and funny. Day seems to be trying to speak primarily to audiences who are not Internet savvy – people who might not understand the appeal of fandom, people who don’t get how the Internet brings us together in both good and bad ways, and people who aren’t familiar with gaming. She’s very careful NOT to release a tell-all, because Day is full of class. If you want to hear about her sex life, or get all the dirt on her co-stars, you will leave disappointed.

I enjoyed hearing her talk about the power of online fandom, and how things like gaming and building online communities helped her develop as a person. But I wanted Day to go deeper. Here are some of my questions:

  • How did Felicia recover from her World of Warcraft addiction? One minute she realizes she has an addiction and seemingly the next minute she’s over it. What was it like to give up such a huge part of her life? How did she do it? How does she manage her addiction and still game? Day does a great job of showing how and why she became addicted but totally glosses over the process of recovery, and I wanted more.
  • Day talks about having severe depression and anxiety during the last couple of seasons of The Guild. After she got more of a handle on her physical and emotional health, Felicia was able to think about other people and she realized that her actions had made things hard for her friends, family, and co-workers. What did she do about it? Did she use this realization to deepen her commitment to taking care of herself? Did she try to make amends to those people in her life?
  • Geek and Sundry is a huge venture, but she barely mentions it. What does it involve? What makes it profitable? How did she get it off the ground? How has it impacted her personal and professional life?
  • I know Day likes to keep it classy, but can’t we have one little peek into a day on set in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or what it was like to be in Doctor Horrible? Day is also well known for her work on Supernatural, where she had a fairly groundbreaking role that ended in a way that upset many fans, but she doesn’t talk about this at all. Even though I don’t watch Supernatural, I would have loved to hear about her time on the show and what it was like to play a groundbreaking character.
  • Day is only in her thirties, so while the book ends with a tidy happy ending (Day has “carved out a perfect job” for herself) I wanted to hear about her hopes for the future, both personal and professional. Maybe she doesn’t think of the future but prefers to concentrate on the present moment – in which case, I would have liked to have heard about that.

On the whole, I enjoyed this book. I read parts of it out loud, laughing, to my husband. I giggled frequently. I read the whole thing in a few hours. It’s a fun read with some very important things to say – take care of yourself, treat your mental health as seriously at you treat your physical health, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, and embrace your own weirdness and creativity. As a quick, light read, this is great.

However, I did feel that it raised a lot of issues only to drop them abruptly. Here’s to hoping that someday Day will write more deeply about the issues she touches on so very lightly in this book.

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You’re Never Weird on the Internet (Almost) by Felicia Day

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  1. Christina McPants says:

    “Felicia shares some very personal things but she also leaves a lot of answered questions.”

    I think you mean unanswered?

  2. CarrieS says:

    You think correctly!

  3. Amy Raby says:

    In my experience, addictions to specific games end naturally when the player either fully masters the game or runs out of content. The WOW team is constantly creating new content to keep their players from getting bored and leaving, but they can never create it as fast as players consume it. It’s a little like being addicted to a book series. When you run out of books, the addiction naturally wanes until the next book comes out, but no writer can write as fast as readers read.

  4. Kate says:

    I just put this on hold at the library after watching a couple of her old Vaginal Fantasy Book Club videos on YouTube this weekend. Though they’ve stopped making videos, the reading group has continued on Goodreads. Day is kind of a heroine among female gamers and geeks in general because she was one of the first to “come out” as a female unabashedly into geeky stuff.

  5. jimthered says:

    Despite the glossed-over or unanswered areas mentioned in the review, I’m looking forward to reading this. I really like Day’s work, and I’d love to learn more about how she more or less made her own way with THE GUILD instead of being cast in other people’s works. And she kicks ass on Table Top!

  6. @Kate, the Vaginal Fantasy videos are still going. They just moved from Geek & Sundry to a dedicated channel on Youtube. The next one is this Sunday, October 4.

  7. Kate says:

    (Different Kate here) I listened to this on audio and thought it was great. The way she talks about depression and working through depression really spoke to me. And the funny bits were even funnier with Felicia reading them. Her comedic timing and delivery is top notch. I absolutely recommend the audiobook.

  8. ClaireC says:

    Another VagFan member piping up to say that videos are still being broadcast! Next one is indeed Sunday (usually they’re Tuesday) at 7pm PST. Here’s the link for the broadcast: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpIcnNlD0uw The pick for September was Rosemary and Rue by Seanan McGuire.

    I went to the book release party here at Housing Works in NYC, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet. I know if I read it on my commute I’ll do a lot of lol’ing so I’m saving it for an afternoon at home. I’ve flipped through and I agree, it sounds exactly like Felicia does in person!

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