The Actual One: How I Tried, and Failed, to Avoid Adulthood Forever [9780062571977]

Overview

A hilarious, razor-sharp debut memoir about the moment when you realize that your friends have all grown up and left you behind, for readers of Caitlin Moran’s How To Be A Woman, Jenny Lawson’s Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and Kelly Williams Brown’s Adulting.

Isy Suttie wakes up one day in her late twenties to discover that the deal she’d struck with her friends, to put off growing up for as long as possible, had been entirely in her head. Everyone around her is suddenly into mortgages, farmers’ markets, and going off the Pill, rather than running naked into the sea or getting hammered in a country pub with eighty-year-old men.

After a particularly crushing breakup precipitated by Isy’s gifting of a human-size papier-mâché penguin to her boyfriend, her dearest friend advises Isy not to worry: the next guy she meets will be The Actual One.

Heartened by this promise, Isy decides to keep delaying the onset of adulthood, whether that means standing on the side of a highway in nothing but an old fur coat and sneakers, dating a man who speaks only in rhyme, or conquering her fears of Alpine skiing by wildly overestimating her athletic ability. Insightful and laugh-out-loud funny, The Actual One is an ode to the confusing wilderness of your late twenties, alongside a quest for a genuinely good relationship . . . or at the very least, a good story to tell.

• British Humor: From drunkenly skinny-dipping in the Celtic sea to navigating the politics of a New Year’s piss-up in Wales, Isy’s voice is painfully relatable and undeniably funny.
• Feeling Left Behind: A painfully funny look at that moment you realize all your friends are suddenly into mortgages and farmers’ markets while you’re still trying to delay adulthood for as long as possible.
• The One vs. The Actual One: After a crushing breakup—precipitated by the gifting of a life-sized papier-mâché penguin—Isy is promised her next love will be "The Actual One." This is the hilarious story of trying to find him… or at least avoid him for a while.
• Laugh-Out-Loud Funny Stories: Featuring tales of dating a man who only speaks in rhyme, waging war with a faulty bikini bottom in Slovenia, and the politics of making a fry-up pie.