Read This to Look Cool

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

For fans of Dolly Alderton or Samantha Irby, Read This to Look Cool is a hilarious and insightful collection of essays exploring the woes of growing up online, social anxiety, and constantly trying to portray an artificial version of yourself.We've all done things to seem cool, to fit in, to project bad-bitch confidence while secretly wondering, Is everyone mad at me? Sometimes that anxiety manifests itself in over-curated Instagram posts or pretending to like matcha-flavored ice cream. But in Maeve Dunigan's case it's taken more extreme forms, like letting her appendix rupture in a McDonald's because she didn't want her friend to think she was flaky. Like Maeve, so many of us are willing to jump through bizarre hoops in futile attempts to control others’ perceptions of ourselves. We all have a primal desire to belong, and the things we do to satisfy that desire end up being really funny.In Read This to Look Cool, Maeve highlights the everyday absurdity inherent in the constant performance of ourselves through a series of hilarious, sometimes all-too-relatable essays and satire pieces. Maeve knows there's nothing cooler than being seen reading a book: it’s sophisticated, it’s charming, it says “I have an iPhone, but I don’t even know where it is.”Laugh-out-loud funny and painfully real, Read This to Look Cool explores our anxieties and ask why we care so much, speaking specifically to a generation growing up with social media and the constant feeling of being perceived.