You’re Doing Great... and Other Reasons to Stay Alive

Comedian Papa (Your Dad Stole My Rake) offers a delightful set of upbeat and candidly humorous essays on the challenges of modern living. Society is “inundated, twenty-four hours a day, with news, images, and ideas of all kinds... and it’s messing with our heads,” he writes. His antidote: be grateful, relax, and stop trying to be perfect (“No one is happy all the time.... Whenever I see couples posting about how in love they are, I know they’re in trouble”). Papa, a Gen Xer who had a common-sense New Jersey Italian-American upbringing, is unapologetic about his passion for eating: “There’s too much happiness and history to put an end to it... who cares if you’re a little fat?” In “Let’s Go Back,” a touching departure from his straight-up humor, Papa writes to a deceased college friend about their shabby house share (“It’s hard when you outgrow something you love. It’s even harder when you lose the people that came with it”). In other essays, Papa recalls a river tubing accident (“It wasn’t awesome. Breaking a couple ribs on a rock at the bottom of a waterfall is stupid”), as well as the joys of living in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood in the 1990s. This collection is a clever respite for readers looking for lighthearted escape from their daily lives. (May)