I Don't Care About Your Band

What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Se nsitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I've Dated

Julie Klausner

- 4.0 • 37 Ratings

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- $14.99

Read Julie Klausner's posts on the Penguin Blog

In the tradition of Cynthia Heimel and Chelsea Handler, and with the boisterous iconoclasm of Amy Sedaris, Julie Klausner's candid and funny debut I Don't Care About Your Band sheds light on the humiliations we endure to find love--and the lessons that can be culled from the wreckage.

I Don't Care About Your Band posits that lately the worst guys to date are the ones who seem sensitive. It's the jerks in nice guy clothing, not the players in Ed Hardy, who break the hearts of modern girls who grew up in the shadow of feminism, thinking they could have everything, but end up compromising constantly. The cowards, the kidults, the critics, and the contenders: these are the stars of Klausner's memoir about how hard it is to find a man--good or otherwise--when you're a cynical grown-up exiled in the dregs of Guyville.

Off the popularity of her New York Times "Modern Love" piece about getting the brush-off from an indie rock musician, I Don't care About Your Band is marbled with the wry strains of Julie Klausner's precocious curmudgeonry and brimming with truths that anyone who's ever been on a date will relate to. Klausner is an expert at landing herself waist-deep in crazy, time and time again, in part because her experience as a comedy writer (Best Week Ever, TV Funhouse on SNL) and sketch comedian from NYC's Upright Citizens Brigade fuels her philosophy of how any scene should unfold, which is, "What? That sounds crazy? Okay, I'll do it."

I Don't Care About Your Band charts a distinctly human journey of a strong-willed but vulnerable protagonist who loves men like it's her job, but who's done with guys who know more about love songs than love. Klausner's is a new outlook on dating in a time of pop culture obsession, and she spent her 20's doing personal field research to back up her philosophies. This is the girl's version of High Fidelity. By turns explicit, funny and moving, Klausner's debut shows the evolution of a young woman who endured myriad encounters with the wrong guys, to emerge with real- world wisdom on matters of the heart. I Don't Care About Your Band is Julie Klausner's manifesto, and every one of us can relate.

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY OCT 19, 2009

Scarsdale-bred actress and entertainer Klausner fashions a breathy, vernacular-veering-into-vulgar, spastically woe-filled account of her youthful heartaches falling for guys who were just not that into her. Chronologically arranged, the brief, zippy anecdotes move from her preadolescent sexual awakenings, poring over Stallions magazine during sleepovers with her girlfriends, through the unsavory details of sleeping with a gallery of losers throughout her 20s. The author likens herself to Miss Piggy from the Muppets, plucky, stylish, mouthy and irrepressible, chasing after the perennially indifferent Kermit, who just wants to hang out with his guy pals. Klausner's eager pursuits of men followed this doomed pattern, from falling for Tom, the long-distant Internet crush in Minnesota, because he got her dorky allusions but happened to be emotionally zero; NYU acquaintance Ryan with "instance-inappropriate intensity" who suggested a threesome; Colin the vegan, who only liked the taste of his own semen; and sex with a grossly ugly person that was supposed to make her feel better about her own inadequacies. Honest she is, though her tales of being young and "habitually dating the damaged" require a strong stomach and a good handle on popular cultural references.

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