The Choke Artist

Book excerpt: In this hilarious collection of essays, David Yoo exposes the pain--and the absurdities--of coming of age when you're awkward, insecure, and unable to stop shooting yourself in the foot. In often cringe-inducing episodes, David Yoo perfectly captures the cycle of failure and fear from childhood through adulthood with brutal honesty Whether he's wearing four layers of clothing to artificially beef up his slim frame, routinely testing highlighters against his forearm to see if he indeed has yellow skin, or preemptively sabotaging promising relationships to avoid being compared to former boyfriends, Yoo celebrates and skewers the insecurities of anxious people everywhere.