Lisick - Yokohama threeway : and other small shames

about the author

Beth Lisick is a writer and performer from the San Francisco Bay Area, currently residing in Brooklyn. Her books include the New York Times bestselling comic memoir Everybody Into the Pool and the gonzo self-help manifesto Helping Me Help Myself . Lisick has toured the U.S. and Europe as a solo spoken-word performer, front person for the band The Beth Lisick Ordeal, and member of the groundbreaking queer roadshow Sister Spit. Her other projects include comedic performance for the stage and screen with Tara
Jepsen , curating the monthly Porchlight Storytelling Series with Arline Klatte, and teaching creative writing to young adults. She played the female lead in Frazer Bradshaws award-winning feature film Everything Strange and New and recently received a grant from the Creative Work Foundation to write a book about the developmentally disabled artists at Creativity
Explored in San Francisco.

Beth Lisicks kaleidoscopic whirlwind tour through her secret shames is the ultimate joyride for those of us who enjoy cringe-worthy embarrassment, genuine pathos, and an overdosing amount of schadenfreude.Michael Ian Black, comedian and author of Youre Not Doing It Right

This book is fucking great. There is a story in it called PANDA AMBULANCE!!! How is Beth Lisick not as famous as David Sedaris?Kathleen Hanna, musician and activist

These short pieces, which at first seem casually constructed and connected, are immediately funny, ironic, personable, embarrassing and oddly appealing. Yet quickly they accumulate into deep emotional resonance. Just a few pages in and I was totally involved with the struggles of this clearly talented, hilariously confused person to be better in her own weird antic backassward ways. Full of indelible phrases (Panda Ambulance!) and painfully irrefutable observations about art, crappy jobs, friendship, wealth, sex, hygiene, booze, motherhood, and so many other things, this book is basically the inverse of those sappy self-discovery memoirs that inevitably arc into hard earned wisdom and self-discovery. This writer has the courage to stay in difficult places, and therefore be truer to life. I laughed and cringed and cared more and more. Thank you, Beth Lisick, it was and continues to be worth all the struggles.Matthew Zapruder, author of Come On All You Ghosts

Yokohama Threeway by Beth Lisick is a whip-smart, occasionally profound, often profane, always very funny collection of somewhere around three hundred (judged by weight) short, sharp, sweet literary shocks. Speaking as someone who hates everything, I love this book.James Greer, musician & author of The Failure

What to call Beth Lisicks Yokohama Threeway ? Part flash fiction, part poetry, part outsider art. Reality television, minus the cameras. Spoon River Anthology meets Tom Waits. Ill settle for hilarious, heartbreaking, compassionate, pitch perfect, utterly original.Joyce Maynard, author of After Her and Labor Day

No matter how civilized we all like to pretend we are, Lisicks writing reminds us how simultaneously wonderful and terrible it is to be alive. By baring her own Oh, no! experiences, she shows us there is no shame in being human. Okay, a lot of shame. But at least its funny shame.Kim Wong Keltner, author of Tiger Babies Strike Back

Yokohama Threeway

AND OTHER SMALL SHAMES

Beth Lisick

City Lights Books | San Francisco

Copyright 2013 by Beth Lisick

All Rights Reserved.

Cover illustration by David L. Cooper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lisick, Beth, 1968

Yokohama threeway : and other small shames / Beth Lisick.

page cm

ISBN 978-0-87286-625-6 (pbk.)

1. Lisick, Beth, 1968Anecdotes. 2. Authors, American20th centuryAnecdotes. I. Title.

PS3562.I77Z479 2013

' .5409dc23

[B]

2013020603

City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore,

261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.

www.citylights.com