How To Be A 20-Something: The eBook
Y'all, we did it. Last month, Steph and I published a compilation of our favorite stories on Thought Catalog that embody what it means to be in your 20s in the 2k10s.
Y’all, we did it. Last month, Steph and I published a compilation of our favorite stories from Thought Catalog that embody what it means to be in your 20s in the 2k10s. You’d be surprised by how long it took us; I bet we spent 80 focused hours whittling down, editing, line editing, copy editing, reordering, and occasionally hitting our foreheads against the wall in absolute frustration because there were so many times we couldn’t get it right. But it paid off, in a humble way: for the first 72 hours or so, we were the number #4 selling book in the Essays category of Amazon.com (beating out Didion, Sedaris, DFW). Unfortunately, that didn’t last THAT long, but it did make us feel pretty good.
To be clear, the premise of this little write-up is just to promote our eBook, How To Be A 20-Something, and maybe get you to buy it, to spike our sales a little bit, if maybe your loved one bought you a Kindle or iPad or iPad mini or whatever for Christmas. It’s a shortish read, and one of our main ideas was to draw the reader through a high-intensity arc — voice and style-driven personal stories from the diverse personas of some fucking amazing writers.
Here’s how you do it: if you own a Kindle, BUY IT HERE. If you own an iPad, BUY IT HERE. And if you don’t own a mobile device, you can download it here.
And that’s it. But, before I’m done, let me give you a bit more incentive:
Here’s a passage I love from a story in How To Be A 20-Something called “Notes On Dating A Crazy Girl” by the infamous/divisive powerhouse named OLIVER MILLER (it’s the first two ‘graphs, actually):
No one ever sets out to date a crazy girl, in the same way that no one ever sets out to become a member of a cult. No one’s like, “HEY MAYBE I’LL JOIN AN INSANE CULT TODAY.” No, you just gradually get sucked in — step by step, day by day, hour by hour — until eventually, you’re just as crazy as she is.
It’s lke Stockholm Syndrome. It’s like how Patty Hearst ended up becoming a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army. Crazy people just wear you down like that. You go from “Ohmigod I can’t believe these insane people kidnapped me,” to “Fuck it, maybe I will help rob a bank,” to, “…Wow, this machine gun fires a lot more smoothly than I thought it would!”
Or how about this one, by former contrib Sarah Nicole Prickett, from “How To Have Sex With Me One Time”:
Make me cum. Again: you’ll know. Orgasms are like the price of heels at Balenciaga. If you have to ask, get the fuck out.
I’m gonna try to convince you one more time with a quote by basically my fav writer on the site: Brad Pike, in a piece called “I Am Extremely Talented And Important”:
If you would just read my blog, maybe you would understand how great I am. It documents my myriad intense feelings, YouTube videos of cats, and image macros of Obama. When you watch the video of kittens playing in a Christmas tree, you will say to yourself, “He likes funny interesting things and is therefore, according to the transitive property, a funny interesting person. We must hire him at once!”
So, buy How To Be A 20-Something, which Steph and I put a bunch of work into and will definitely have you sufficiently and enjoyably distracted from your food coma and your relatives who you can’t relate to anymore.
/shameless self-promotion. 
