Product Description

When everything sucks,
change everything . . .

And that's exactly what Hannah Friedman set out to do in an ambitious attempt to bust out of a life of obscurity and absurdity and into an alternate world of glamour, wealth, and popularity.

Being dubbed 'That Monkey Girl' by middle school bullies and being pulled out of sixth grade to live on a tour bus with her agoraphobic mother, her smelly little brother, and her father's hippie band mates convinces Hannah that she is destined for a life of freakdom.

But when she enters one of the country's most prestigious boarding schools on scholarship, Hannah transforms herself into everything she is not: cool. By senior year, she has a perfect millionaire boyfriend, a perfect GPA, a perfect designer wardrobe, and is part of the most popular clique in school, but somehow everything begins to suck far worse than when she first started. Her newfound costly drug habit, eating disorder, identity crisis, and Queen-Bee attitude lead to the unraveling of Hannah's very unusual life.

Putting her life back together will take more than a few clicks of her heels, or the perfect fit of a glass slipper, in this not-so-fairy tale of going from rock bottom to head of the class and back again.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #272791 in Books
• Published on: 2009-08-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 264 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780757307751
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Hannah Friedman (Peekskill, NY) is a recent Yale University graduate. She is the daughter of gold-record singer/songwriter Dean Friedman. An article titled "When Your Friends Become the Enemy" about her experiences applying to an Ivy League University was published in Newsweek in 2004. Ms. Friedman is the winner of the Yale 2007 Playwright's Festival, as well as the New York Television Festival's 2008 "Flying Solo" Pilot Contest. Her pilot about transitioning from college student to author will debut at the Festival in September 2008. Visit http://hannahfriedman.hcibooks.com

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

chapter two
Periods Suck

Sometimes the road is a magical place. We travel to ancient castles where the wind whips across the green Irish hillside with such force that you can lean all the way into it without falling over. We see double rainbows and gamble at racetracks and ride in long skinny boats with gardens on the roof that sail down English canals in neat little rows. We visit chocolate factories and play music in haunted theaters and eat Twinkies for dinner at three in the morning. Everyone says Dad's album is going to be a huge hit. We're finally going to be rich and Mom will never complain and Dad's going to play to sold-out concert halls full of screaming fans, just like when he started out. The album poster even appears on big red double-decker buses all around London. We're famous.

The best part is that I don't have to go to school. Every week or so, Mom asks Sam and me what we want to learn about and we make a plan. For architecture, we visit palaces and cathedrals and I build a scale model of the Tower of ­London. For theater, we see shows on the West End and take walking tours of the Royal Opera House and stand on the steps of Saint Paul's, where Eliza Doolittle would have sold Henry Higgins that fateful flower. I want to learn about fashion, so we visit the Victoria and Albert Museum to study four centuries of European clothing—corsets, crinoline, gorgeous hoopskirts. There's even a whole exhibit on tiaras. I am in heaven.

When the tour seems to be doing well, Dad hires four cheap twenty-something musicians—a pixie-haired saxophonist, a tattooed bassist, a manic drummer, and a beer-guzzling guitarist whose name I never catch— to be his band, and they move onto the bus with us. I try to be cool in front of them, but it's hard to be a rebel when you are confined to a bus the size of a bathroom with your entire family. My only means of financial independence comes from the pittance I am paid for managing Dad's mailing list database, and I need to cooperate to have enough pocket money to spend on quirky items from all the strange places we visit. I learn to juggle an hour-glass-shaped Chinese yo-yo at an international festival and how to sew patched jeans under a colorful tent at an Irish crafts fair. I am enthralled by the bustling bohemian markets of Camden—ancient cobblestones and neon green Mohawks; winding alleyways filled with exotic tapestries, sparkly fishnet stockings, and Buddha figurines hand-carved from walnuts; old men in weather-beaten stalls hawking fresh fish and chips with pickles and peas and truffles filled with cognac and cappuccino crème.

I buy flowing harem pants with sequins from a shop that smells of warm red spices. The saxophonist picks up a sachet of henna from the adjoining stall, and she shows me how to draw temporary tattoos on my hands. Sax and I mix the pigment and then squeeze wormy little lines of henna from the tip of a plastic bag into swirls and paisley peacocks and feathery earthen rings. We listen to Louis Armstrong and wait for the clay to dry until it cracks and feels tight and pulls at our skin, and then we scratch it off to reveal dark tan patterns that map our giggles through long six-hour rides of countryside boredom as we drive from town to town.
But soon I start to feel claustrophobic. Sleeping inside a cramped, itchy vehicle that smells like wet dog behind a drummer who compulsively tap-a-tap-taps at all hours of the day, even if the only remotely percussive object in reach is a breadstick, and sharing a bed with your spastic little brother and an oversized bass case while your parents have intense discussions about 'finances' and 'responsibility' in gritted whispers, as if the entire damn bus can't hear everything they say, is pretty much as far from magical as you can get. The only time I encounter people my own age is when I am forced to hock CDs featuring a picture of my parents making out on the cover to their parents, who have dragged them to the concert against their will and smoosh CDs in their faces, saying, 'Oooh, darling, did you know that you were conceived to this song?' Dad won't stop making bad puns. Mom won't stop complaining. British people use weird words and eat pizza with a knife and fork and I don't have any friends here and I want to go home.

I express my indignation with a lot of arm-folding and eye-rolling and many self-imposed silence-strikes, which usually do not have the effect I intend.
'I'm going to pick up some chocolate ice cream after the show for anybody who says they're interested . . . ' Dad tempts.
My brother is less tactful in his attempts to engage me. 'I'm calling you snotbuttface from now on. That's okay, right, snotbuttface? OW! Snotbuttface pinched me!'

Even in spite of my frequent silence-strikes, our ancient Scottish driver and road manager, Gabhran, is still the quietest member of the tour. I'm convinced he's actually a mute for three months until a petrol station in Aberdeen is all out of cigarettes and he mutters something quickly with a lot of 'feck' and 'shite' in a creaky Scottish brogue. He survives, as far as I can tell, on cigarettes, black coffee, and hard rock alone. He does not smile. He does not eat. He never takes off his sunglasses, and he has a full beard the likes of which I've only seen on TV wizards and ZZ Top. The combination makes it impossible to tell whether he's annoyed, asleep, or even freakin' alive. He was a professional racecar driver until he broke thirty-nine bones in an accident and became a road manager for traveling bands. My mother is not impressed when Dad tells her the story.

'Why don't we just throw the kids out the window now and save them the trouble?'     
'Honey, everybody loves this guy. He does headliners, international tours—he's the best!'
Mom heaves the final box of CDs in the back of the bus and slams the trunk with intention. 'Then why the hell is he with us?'

After a while I stop kneeling in the catwalks to watch my dad perform. He is amazing, engaging, his performance
virtuosic, but I can't stand peering down at half- and then quarter-full audiences. The advertising budgets have been slashed, Dad's manager stops returning his calls, and pretty soon we're opening to twelve people in a twelve-hundred-seat theater. We're losing money. Even the local radio shows cancel on us. I feel like I'm letting the family down when CD sales drop so low they don't even cover the cost of gas. I try new pitches. I make flashier signs and start accosting people in the lobby during intermission to guilt them into buying the stacks of unsold merchandise. 'Pay for my college education!' I tell them, which seems to make people laugh, though I know it's hardly a joke.

My mother is livid. The tour is a bust.
'I left my animals. I left everything for this—this—this idiotic fantasy!'
'You're the one who said we owed it to ourselves to give it one last—do you know what we could have had if we hadn't decided to keep—'
'Shutupshutupshutup!' I finally shout after 65 kilometers of pretending to ignore the passive-aggressive whispers. 'You're both wrong!'

Mom explains she's not upset, that this just wasn't what she expected. Dad explains he's not upset either, that nothing is wrong and this is all part of the plan and everyone should try to just enjoy the ride. I explain that I am majorly upset. I haven't taken a proper shower in weeks and I'm missing the first big middle school dance on Friday and nobody ever asked me if I wanted to do this in the first place. They tell me to stop being so overdramatic.

I never thought I'd miss being That Monkey Girl who gets good grades, but now that the only person to hang out with is my little brother and nobody gives me gold stars even when I do a really good job, I realize with a twinge of terror that spending another year like this on the road is going to turn me into something much worse than a girl with a strange pet. I'll become a crazy social recluse just like my parents. I'll become my mother, unwittingly insulting hostesses by telling them that the viscosity of their fancy hollandaise sauce reminds me of phlegm. I'll become my father, breaking world records for wallpaper-staring while the party of the century unfolds around me. In order to forestall this awful fate, I resolve to actively chat with roadies and venue managers, to befriend stage hands, to make everybody laugh, if only to keep the monotony of six-hour road trips from driving me slowly insane. The monotony of six-hour road trips halts the night that we almost die.

The night that we almost die also happens to be the night of the big dance back home. I am awakened from a dream in which I am slow-dancing with Nick Nunzio, the most popular boy in school, by the sound of gunfire and blaring horns as the bus starts to convulse like the universe is in a giant blender—Krrkrrrrkkrrrrr!—am I still dreaming? Someone screams. Everything flips sideways. Instruments and sheet music and boxes of CDs tumble out from overhead racks, raining down all over as a low, metallic growl fills the bus. And then, everything is suddenly still—silent, except for the wispy ssshooms of cars on the highway speeding past.

According to the road crew, if it hadn't been for Gabhran's deft and lightning-fast maneuvering after the tire exploded as we charged down the highway, we would have careened straight into oncoming traffic and been pummeled to a pulp.

'It's jes' unbelievable,' says a guy in a grey uniform, shaking his head. 'Ya wove tru traffic and crossed all ta way to ta shoulder widout bloody front tires! Ya must 'ave some right steady 'ands on ya.'

Gabhran shrugs and taps the ash from his cigarette.

'Oh, boy, do I need a snack,' says Dad after we make sure everybody is okay, after all the sirens and smoke and the brand new tires.
My mother stares straight ahead. 'How can you think about food at a time like this? We almost just died.'
'We haven't eaten since Liverpool. Kids, don't you want some ice cream?'

Customer Reviews

Everything Sucks (except this book)
Everything Sucks is a brutally funny and honest look of the prep school career of Hannah Friedman, who is attending the tony school as a scholarship student. There are seventeen chapters of "things that suck," including family, mean girls, friends, high school, diets, love, sex, education, home college, drugs, and well, everything, including epilogues!

Some of the funniest parts of Hannah's memoir are those about her family. Amelia, a monkey is Hannah's oldest "sister" and was adopted by Hannah's mom, who trained monkeys to assist paraplegics. Hannah's dad is a talented singer-songwriter proficient in a variety of musical instruments. During one chapter, Hannah's family (plus her brother Sam, minus Amelia) and her father's entire band jam into a small van/bus for a concert tour in England. The tour inflicts a variety of humiliations on Hannah including home schooling, tight quarters, dwindling audience interest, a nearly catastrophic accident followed by an equally mortifying and hysterical experience in a convenience store.

The chapters about Hannah's experience at Danforth Academy are an insider's view of teen-age popularity, casual cruelty, and the stress of achieving academic success in the midst of experiencing her first love, drugs, sex, and death of a friend. Anyone who attended high school in the US will be able to relate to Hannah's clear depiction of peer pressure, the desire to belong, and clueless adults.

Reading Everything Sucks is like talking with an older sister about high school and having her share her swings between cool and uncool, lost and found. Hopefully is the first of many books by a talented new writer.

Everything Sucks . . . RULES
I read "Everything Sucks" until the sun came up this morning.
When I started reading it, I'd put it down to throw laundry in, or eat dinner, but I'd find myself glancing over at it . . . in wonderment. I was desperate to find out what was going on with her. Was she going to fall in love? Was she going to finally let Cashmere have it? Was she gonna blaze with the hippies? Was she going to come to terms with things? I was so drawn into her world. It certainly brought me back to when I was 14/15/16 years old. And somehow my past was soothed by this memoir.
This book, nay, this woman is brilliant. She has gracefully splattered herself across these pages, holding nothing back. I could ask for nothing more from a writer. Bottom line: this is a story that everyone can relate to, and everything else will just blow your mind! I laughed, I cried, I felt her emotions.


I found out about Hannah Friedman when one of the people that I follow on youtube sent a link to her channel (www.youtube.com/WritingHannah). I watched every single video. I was blown away by her mind, her heart, her creativity, her TALENT! I couldn't get enough. Then I watched the trailer for this book. My mind soared! I logged on here and bought the book (thank you Amazon.com for getting it to me so quickly!). Just recently I bought 2 more copies for my best friend and my boyfriend.
This is a must have in anyone's collection. Do yourself a favor: buy it, and love it with me.

Amazing book
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1MDUWVAHP31F5 I recorded this video immediately upon finishing Everything Sucks, so please forgive my bedraggled appearance. THis video, was orignially posted in response to a video on the author's youtube channel [...].

This past semester I took a course in Adolescent Literature and one of the points we focused on was the authenticity of the narrator's voice in a given work. Did it sound like an adolescent or like an adult trying to sound adolescent to connect with their target audience? Some were better than others, but I have to say, of any "adolescent literature" I've read recently, Everything Sucks definitely has it nailed. Honestly, it was refreshing how on point Hannah's voice was, because I'm not sure there is anything more off-putting to me than didacticism veiled in the voice of a 15 year old.