“I’ve always felt like a failure inside if I’m not already a success.”

4.5 stars

I’m trying to recall where I first encountered Felicia Day. I think it may in fact have been on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where she played one of the many potential slayers in season seven. I know I saw her in Dr Horrible’s Sing-a-Long Blog (true story, on our honey-moon seven years ago, I declined to go out and explore Stockholm with my husband until I had used the hotel wi-fi – which was really rather slow – to download and watch the second episode) before I actually watched and got completely hooked on The Guild.

I’ve known of and admired Felicia Day for a long time, is what I’m saying. I’ve been a member of her online book club, Vaginal Fantasy since it started, and one of the highlights of my month is watching her and her co-hosts talk about fantasy and/or sci-fi romance. I’ve probably watched most of the stuff she’s put out on the web, including Co-Optitude, where she plays video games with her brother. So naturally I was going to pre-order this book. I chose to get the audio book, so Felicia herself could read me her memoir.

While I knew that Felicia Day was a good actress in the things I’d seen her in, as well as extremely smart, creative, fond of video games and romance and an internet entrepreneur, I learned so many new things about her from this book. That she and her brother were home-schooled, that she went to college at sixteen and ended up with a double major in violin and mathematics, or that the reason she cut her hair in a pixie cut a while back (which she, naturally, as a woman on the internet got so much hate about) was because stress and other very serious medical issues made her hair fall out in clumps.

I suspect that even if you don’t really know who Felicia Day is, you’ll enjoy this book. She’s very honest and open and recounts stories from her life and her many impressive achievements in a very entertaining way. Being a successful woman in the social media age is not easy, being a successful woman who dares to have an interest in and opinions of video games on the internet has made her the target of a lot of hate and harassment. She’s very forthcoming about her anxieties, the two years she was completely addicted to World of Warcraft, her obsessions and what drives her. I found her impressive and admirable before, now I’m very much in awe of her. This is not a funny celebrity autobiography like Bossypants or Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, although there are absolutely bits that made me laugh out loud. The closest comparison I can think of is Jenny Lawson’s book, but they’re really not all that similar.

This isn’t a very long book, I listened to it in less than twenty-four hours. It pretty much made me feel all the feels and I can highly recommend it.

Crossposted on my blog.