Miss Misery; A Novel

by Andy Greenwald

• ISBN13: 9781416902409
• ISBN10: 1416902406
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-12-27
• Publisher: Simon Spotlight Entertainment

Summary

Picking up where his cult hit "Nothing Feels Good" left off, Greenwald returns to the intoxicatingly emotional world of indie rock, this time in a much more personal way.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Late April	1	(9)
Cities that Begin with ``The''	10	(14)
Quizilla Conquers Brooklyn	24	(13)
My Aim is True	37	(13)
Mixed Media	50	(30)
Awfully Cute, Like the Martian Skyline	80	(10)
Books with More than One Author	90	(23)
Hello? Lunch? (Or: Surprise! Yourself.)	113	(13)
The Real One	126	(18)
Doesn't That Mean, Like, Flexible?	144	(36)
Ring . . . Ring . . . Ring	180	(8)
Independence, Daze	188	(18)
The Grand Finale	206	(40)
Roller-Coaster Screams	246	(30)
Great! Salt Lake!	276	(54)
New Orders From Mission Control	330	(14)
(Try Again)	344	(9)
A Whole Lot More Accurate	353	(32)
Acknowledgments	385

Excerpts

Prologue: Late April Miss Misery was online again. It was becoming more and more difficult to ignore her, waiting, crouched almost, feline -- or was it supine? -- in my buddy list. I knew where she was -- online -- but I still didn't know where she was. Other than in my head, of course, which was where she seemed to reside more and more often. It was late April, and I was sitting at my desk, gray shirt, blue boxers. My laptop clock said it was 1:08 A.M., but it was running about ten minutes fast. On my headphones, a mix I had made for Amy's birthday skipped tracks; in the silence, I thought I heard her shift in her sleep. Or almost sleep. Another song started then, one by Rilo Kiley: "The Good That Won't Come Out." A jaunty number about creative constipation. Not bad, I thought. Appropriate, even. I wondered if the crescendo would be audible to Amy even through the headphones. I caught a glimpse of my reflection in the window, framed in the halo of light from my computer screen. Familiar face, familiar situation. I looked tired, but that was the way I felt all the time these days. I was tired, but I didn't ever feel like sleeping. Just then, Miss Misery switched on her away message. It was the usual one, a verse from the Cure's "To Wish Impossible Things." What was she doing at one in the morning? Who was she away with? Who was she away from? Maybe it was all just a tease. A way of letting me and all of her other virtual admirers know that she was around -- just not around for us. The lady in her chambers. The lady will see you now. Except she won't. Behind me Amy coughed. I signed off, hushed the music. It was time for bed. Again. [fromhttp://users.livejournal.com/~MzMisery]Time:2:36 A.M.Mood:ThoughtfulMusic:Wheat, "Hope and Adams" I'm smoking while I type this tonight - getting ash in between the pristine white keys, probably, and I don't care. Benson & Hedges 100s, apparently. I think it's what Mom used to smoke. Cody gave me three tonight before he dropped me off. I'm on number two now and won't go to sleep until all three are gone. When I went to the doctor back in January she asked me (like she does every year) if I smoked and blah blah blah and this year I just felt like fuck it basically and told her yes. She seemed kind of surprised at first, but then mostly just tired. She rattled off this long list of reasons why I shouldn't smoke, but I could see it in her eyes that she had already given up on convincing me to quit. One of them was "your teeth will turn yellow" and I thought that (a) obviously this is the dumbest thing of all time to be worried about but also (b) I DON'T CARE. I mean, I LIKE the idea of old me with my yellow mouth - of my stupid too small teeth slowly picking up bits of tar and nicotine and whatever and changing color like leaves do in autumn. I'm looking at all this smoke that I'm taking into my body and then pushing out the open window here next to my desk and thinking - DON'T GO. I want to have evidence that I did it. Otherwise what's the point? I want it to change me. I want it to color me. Otherwise I wouldn't do it. Where were girls in my freshman year unit who were already obsessed with getting older. These girls were like 18 and they weren't afraid of leaving home and they weren't afraid of falling into wells - they were afraid of wrinkles. I think their priorities were entirely wrong, but none of them ever asked me. Sometimes when I walk around through the city in the early early morning (which is rare, I admit it - it's more likely to be the very very late night and I haven't gone to sleep yet) I think of myself being older and being actually old and I wish it could happen sooner. There are times when I don't like how unmarked and smooth my skin is, how utterly snappable my bones feel. I want density and debris; I want to live my li