Why the Long Face?
The Adventures of a Truly Independent Actor
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5.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Craig Chester's witty and wry observations on his life and those who have occupied it come together to create this funny, sentimental, yet irreverent collection of essays. From the backroads of Texas to the boardrooms of Hollywood, Craig Chester is unabashedly honest about the pain and the unique rewards of remaining an outsider in an insider's world.
While his family prepares to watch the apocalypse from their rooftop with a bucket of KFC, Craig is trying to climb the social ladder at school by saving his neighbors from their sinful ways and speaking in tongues (with not-so-successful results). Along the way Craig experiences gender confusion at grade-school summer camp and has massive reconstructive surgery to correct his deformed teenage face, only to emerge and realize that Hollywood success isn't always measured in externals, but also in the machinations of the heart and how much you don't show. All along he expertly captures the feeling of what it's like to not always fit in—and have that be okay—with a comic timing that's tuned in to the heart and soul of trying to get by day to day.
His tales of life, from growing up in the Bible Belt to starring in nine films, prove that the average American life is anything but normal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this witty, absorbing memoir, Chester muses about his unlikely trajectory from growing up around trailer parks and born-again Christians to working as an openly gay actor who's appeared in several indie films, including Swoon, for which he earned a Spirit Award nomination. An engaging storyteller, Chester indiscriminately pokes fun at himself and others and is almost always upbeat (save for nicknaming his hellish summer camp "Kidshwitz"). It's not all light, though. Chester tackles serious issues and candidly reveals his own struggles with his career, relationships, substance abuse and a disfiguring jaw malady (hence the title: "By fourteen," he writes, "I looked like a Picasso sock puppet with pimples") that required extensive, painful surgeries. Although readers may wonder how real some of Chester's fiction-worthy characters are, they'll nonetheless be entertained. Chester has a fresh voice-though occasionally he tries too hard to be funny-and when he opines that "the most counterproductive barriers to true genius are a healthy childhood, healthy relationships, and healthy surroundings," readers will be grateful he suffered no such encumbrances.
