Superstud: Or How I Became a 24-Year-Old Virgin [Paperback]

"Superstud", the sequel to "Freaks & Geeks" creator Paul Feig's childhood memoir "Kick Me", bills itself as a humorous recollection of the author's struggles dating the opposite sex. For those of us who know about being a casualty of love, there's undeniable appeal to such a project, and Feig delivers with comedy and surprising poignancy on occasion.

But I've always been suspicious of people whose claims of geekdom lead to the golden lights of Hollywood, and that suspicion builds reading this book. Feig claims to suffer the shame of being a geek, but it reads more like he wasn't a jock. He not only goes out on dates with attractive girls, but takes the initiative in breaking up with a couple of them. His lack of sex is something he blames as much on a strict religious upbringing as a lack of opportunity, and his parting thought saying people should just be happy doing what they feel like doing doesn't sound like someone who really knows about suffering over love.

The real story of Feig's frustrations boils down to what he calls "dating math": "She wants me = I don't want her/She doesn't want me = I want her."

So real geeks and recovering geeks should be forewarned. Take it from me: I asked 19 girls to my junior prom before getting a yes. A woman I once declared my love for wound up bilking me out of $265 for an imaginary trip to Rhode Island. I once managed to score tickets to the Letterman show for a girl I liked, only to have her announce in the middle of it: "By the way, this is not a date."

Reading this book, I felt like a 'Nam vet listening to some ex-Coast Guarder tell me about his weekend in Grenada. Feig actually was a fairly attractive young man, as the book cover shows, blessed with a quick wit, Han Solo hair, and access to pretty females who often found him entertaining.

The funniest section of the book is an early date with a high school girl that worked much like my Letterman non-date, except the show was an REO Speedwagon concert (Feig gets a lot of early 80s references in, which entertained me) and there is much vomit. Vomit is a recurring theme in this book, along with some other bodily fluids we won't mention.

Feig's description of some auto-erotic moments are both bold and funny, getting intimate with fashion magazines much like George Costanza once did, dealing with sudden public "equipment issues" while perusing photography books, and the like. All this is funny, but a bit forced, like the self-conscious footnotes he inserts in a series of late 1981 journal entries describing one of his courtships, replete with lines like "Let the downfall begin!" and such like.

The part I was most moved by didn't have to do with love or sex at all, but rather a strange burst of homesickness Feig suffers while leaving for college, after he itemizes all the tiny things of his parents' house he has come to identify with. "It felt like the minute I left the house for California, everything was going to be incinerated or ransacked by looters who would leave these sentimental items broken and scattered all over the street in front of our house."

There's one authentic-feeling moment of geekhood I recognized all too well. And truthfully, it's probably a more readable book with Feig not being so much of a geek. If he was, this would read like a 300-page version of Janis Ian's "At Seventeen", and how much fun would that be?

But I would have felt more at home with it than this.

This is a man who bares his soul in the universal quest to find love. He also shares the shame and the cringe-worthy hilarity of the all-consuming attempts at finding love especially as an adolescence. I think many will find this book screamingly funny as he tells stories of awkward attempts at luring the opposite sex and discovering his sexuality. It is strangely sweet as well because really everyone has been there, (maybe not nearly ending up in a hospital trying out something new) and he reaches the dorky romantic in all of us who just wants someone to hold our hand and love us despite being uncool.

When the dedication page of a book makes you laugh, you can assume one of two things: 1) either this is as good as it's going to get, or 2) this book is going to be outrageously funny.

Fortunately, it's option #2. I generally take awhile to get through a book, generally taking several months to several years. But this was a book I bought from the day it was released, and finished it in less than a week. Not only was this book fun to read, it made me cringe in places, and often mull over my own life. Paul Feig's life certainly put things in perspective of my own (whether for good or bad).

For all of the detail and writing that he spent on describing his past relationships, when Judgment Day finally came, it almost felt like that the author was just trying to finish off the book. Or maybe I am just waiting for the 2nd part of this story to read how everything ended up in life, between his old friends, his wife, his current life, etc. But perhaps, he might even create a more comprehensive autobiography someday to continue from the time of the early 80s, to his (varying) successes as a writer of various entertainment mediums.