The vibrant, funny, and heartwarming story of an outcast who becomes an odd man in If you have ever felt like a misfit in school or been paralyzed by your family’s imposing expectations, if you have ever obsessed about your appearance or panicked about choosing a career path, if you have ever wondered if every single thing to which your body is exposed, from egg yolks to X-rays, might harm you, then you may be surprised to find a kindred spirit in The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt. Growing up in sunny La Jolla, California, Jon-Jon Goulian was a hyperneurotic kid who felt out of place wherever he turned, and who, in his own words, was forever on the verge of “caving in beneath the pressures of modern life.” From his fear of competition to his fear of pimples, from his fear of sex to his fear of saturated fat, the range and depth of Jon-Jon’s phobias were seemingly boundless. With his two older brothers providing a sterling example he believed he could never live up to, and his stern grandfather, the political philosopher Sidney Hook, continually calling him to account for his intellectual failure, Jon-Jon, feeling pressed against the wall, wracked with despair, and dizzy with insecurity, instinctively resorted, for reasons that became clear to him only many years later, to a most ingenious scheme for keeping conventional expectations at bay: women’s clothing! Ingenious, perhaps, but woefully ineffective, as Jon-Jon discovers, again and again, that behind his skirt, leggings, halter top, and high heels, he’s still as wildly neurotic, and as wracked with anxiety, as he’s always been. In this hilarious and heartfelt memoir, Jon-Jon Goulian’s witty and exuberant voice shines through, as he comes to terms with what it means to truly be yourself.
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"I won this book from a giveaway and I entered it for no reason other than the title caught my eye. Not knowing what the book would be about I started it ready for anything, and what I got was nothing I was expecting. The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt is a memoir, each chapter opening with something happening in his life, and then quickly shifting to something else from his past that relates to the theme of that chapter. While this did lead me to expecting what was coming next I really did like the way he wrote his story. In the beginning few chapters of the book I began to wonder why he wrote a memoir, what had he done? I realized then at the end that thats just it, he hadn't "done" anything, he just lived how he wanted and that led him to have one of the most interesting lives (with a somewhat exception of one chapter, which was a bit uncomfortable to read but still interesting!) I have ever read about. That is what I have taken from this story, live how you want and its never too late to change your life. I extremely enjoyed reading about his life, excellent book."
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Dylan (4 out of 5 stars)