Self-Sabotage: And Other Ways I’ve Spent My Time
by Jeffery Self
Why You'll Love This
Jeffery Self has failed spectacularly, repeatedly, and on multiple coasts — and somehow that makes this the most reassuring book you'll read this year.
- Great if you want: queer coming-of-age chaos mixed with genuine artistic ambition
- The experience: breezy but unexpectedly tender — laughs land, then quietly sting
- The writing: Self's essays are sharp and self-aware without tipping into self-pity
- Skip if: you want structured memoir — this is loose, digressive, and episodic
About This Book
There's a particular kind of person who keeps tripping over their own best intentions, who chases a dream with genuine ferocity and still somehow ends up flat on their face—and Jeffery Self has made that person the subject of an honest, funny, and unexpectedly tender book. Moving from small-town Georgia through New York and Los Angeles and back again, Self maps the gap between who we imagine we'll become and who we actually are, asking questions about ambition, identity, and the specific exhaustion of being a creative person who refuses to quit. The stakes here aren't dramatic in the conventional sense; they're the quieter, more relatable kind—wanting your life to mean something while regularly getting in your own way.
What makes this book worth sitting with is Self's voice: self-aware without being self-pitying, sharp without losing its warmth. The essay format lets him move fluidly between hilarious set pieces and genuinely disarming moments of vulnerability, and he earns both. He writes about gay adolescence, artistic ambition, and personal failure with specificity rather than sentiment, which makes the emotional payoff feel real rather than manufactured. Readers who've ever talked themselves out of something good will find this uncomfortably familiar—in the best way.