The full title of Julie Klausner’s book – part memoir, part field notes on years of misadventures in the New York City dating battlefield (because Love, as Pat Benatar was so kind to remind us, is most certainly a battlefield) – is I Don’t Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux Sensitive Hipsters, and Other Guys I’ve Dated.
When you reach the end, you realize it wasn’t just a clever hook, but a promise. Klausner’s collection of short, hilariously brutal stories runs the gamut from childhood tales of sexual curiosity and romantic optimism, to valiant efforts to make a long distance relationship come together, to good old fashioned terrible dates with perverts, textbook commitophobes and pretentious musicians, all wrapped up in Klausner’s pop culture-laden, self-deprecating style. It’s like what Carrie Bradshaw would sound like if she were Jewish, had a little more brains and a lot more balls.
Klausner begins this chronicle of broken hearts and bedroom farce with a little disclosure: “First of all, I will always be a subscriber to the sketch comedy philosophy of how a scene should unfold, which is ‘What? That sounds crazy! OK, I’ll do it. The other thing is, I love men like it is my job.”
Klausner spends absolutely no time feeling sorry for herself or offering excuses for her romantic missteps, but she makes no apologies for them either. She’s a comedy writer, after all, and may be thinking that what does not kill her will make her funnier. Whether it was all those bad dates or not, we may never know, but I Don’t Care About Your Band is definite proof that she is really damn funny.
But what moves this book beyond the level of “Men are Pigs” shtick and into the realm of something that’s not just giggle-worthy but lasting, is the wisdom of Klaunser’s work. She’s been through the kind of relationship hell you only see on HBO (and even they won’t show all of it), yet she’s come out the other side with a continued sense of optimism that’s neither cock-eyed (pun?) nor misplaced. There’s no bitterness here, no sense of vengeance, no “Here’s What’s Wrong With Me and It’s THEIR Fault” treatise on men and why they’re horrible.
Every chapter is peppered with a few little grains of relationship philosophy, but I Don’t Care About Your Band could never be mistaken for a “How to Meet Guys That Aren’t Nutbars” manual. At times it might seem like Klausner is sending mixed messages, but looking closer you find that all those layers of pontificating on this guy and that guy, this breakup and that one, this one night stand and that really awkward email, are just an expression of the chaos that is Klausner’s dating history. At times it makes you cringe, or even yell at the book like that guy in the back of the movie theatre (bitch, he got a knife!), but it never stops being funny, not just because it’s true, but because we’re in the hands of a talent who’s as brave with her writing as she is with her new suitors. All the miserable dates and ghosts of boyfriends past are churned up and deftly renewed as anecdotal evidence that God had comedy in mind when he invented sex.
I Don’t Care About Your Band is a hilarious book by a good writer, but it’s what is at its heart, a woman still believing in love despite encounters with bedbugs, narcissists and bad kissers, that makes it great. It sounds corny, but it’s what keeps you turning the pages.