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A review by jugglingpup
Suck Less: Where There's a Willam, There's a Way by Willam Belli
1.0
To see more reviews check out MI Book Reviews.
I want to preface this with a special note. I love Willam. I have watched every movie, memorized every song, watched the only season of RuPaul’s Drag Race that matters (and the Untucked episodes too), seen every episode of Willam’s Beatdown (both the original on The Stylish and the one on her personal YouTube), I even follow her on Facebook (I follow maybe three or four celebrities, that’s it). I have been a fan of Willam’s since 2011 or 2012. This love has tremendously influenced this review.
I hated this book. It is one of the worst pieces of trash I have gotten through. Cosmo has more helpful tips than this book did. I kept reading solely because I love the author’s work. I tried to hard to like the book. The jokes were low brow, even for Willam. There was even a bare-backing joke that was reused multiple times. If it was used once, then it would have registered as funny, but reusing it when it clearly isn’t a catchphrase cheapened it. There were jokes that were reused from the Beatdown, which didn’t bug me at first because the joke I picked up on being reused was probably one of my favorite lines from that series. Combine that reusing of jokes form the show and the book and I felt the book was just tired.
The book started off as a tutorial on how to become better, but within a few chapters that premise was lost and only held as a way to format things. The last half of the book was clearly just bragging, not even humblebragging. Every time she started to appear real and started to redeem her writing, she would go on a tirade of bad jokes or start bragging. It was a roller coaster of suck. If this was read in multiple sittings then it would probably be an easier read and funnier. Reading it in one sitting is not recommended in the slightest. I tried to express how I felt about this book to a huge fan of drag queens and he asked “what did you expect?”. I really expected this to be funny and be able to follow a basic premise. I didn’t even have that high of standards because I know Willam’s best work is done when she is drunk or high. That alone should tell you I expected very little.
There was a tremendous amount of fatphobia, transphobia, and classism throughout the book. Promoting eating disorders is not funny. Telling you to ditch your friends because they aren’t trendy enough to be in pictures, what? Actively saying that penises are the only body part that matter and equating malehood with penises, despite pretending to be trans friendly. I can go on for days about my issues with Willam and trans people, which I have been able to ignore but recently this has started to become such a large problem that I can no longer justify it by saying it is all an act and that people see how ignorant she is being so they understand it is bad. Instead it is now feeling like she uses trans as an insult so often that it is becoming more acceptable to just call an ugly drag queen a trans woman because all trans women are ugly (there are multiple jokes about bathrooms in the book that just left a bad taste in my mouth even). There was a section of the book that talks about how she won’t use the term tranny, but she ALWAYS says her version of trans, which just struck me as asinine how she says it. So what that she is missing the ending. She has turned trans into a slur to be funny.
If I never hear another dick or poop joke again, it will be too soon. I know what Willam is like and what humor to expect, but even this was lower than I expected. I agree with Rhea Litre, I would love to have Willam write a memoir. I would give Willam another shot for a memoir, but I am starting to think I have outgrown Willam, even though she has the best boat. BGB.
I want to preface this with a special note. I love Willam. I have watched every movie, memorized every song, watched the only season of RuPaul’s Drag Race that matters (and the Untucked episodes too), seen every episode of Willam’s Beatdown (both the original on The Stylish and the one on her personal YouTube), I even follow her on Facebook (I follow maybe three or four celebrities, that’s it). I have been a fan of Willam’s since 2011 or 2012. This love has tremendously influenced this review.
I hated this book. It is one of the worst pieces of trash I have gotten through. Cosmo has more helpful tips than this book did. I kept reading solely because I love the author’s work. I tried to hard to like the book. The jokes were low brow, even for Willam. There was even a bare-backing joke that was reused multiple times. If it was used once, then it would have registered as funny, but reusing it when it clearly isn’t a catchphrase cheapened it. There were jokes that were reused from the Beatdown, which didn’t bug me at first because the joke I picked up on being reused was probably one of my favorite lines from that series. Combine that reusing of jokes form the show and the book and I felt the book was just tired.
The book started off as a tutorial on how to become better, but within a few chapters that premise was lost and only held as a way to format things. The last half of the book was clearly just bragging, not even humblebragging. Every time she started to appear real and started to redeem her writing, she would go on a tirade of bad jokes or start bragging. It was a roller coaster of suck. If this was read in multiple sittings then it would probably be an easier read and funnier. Reading it in one sitting is not recommended in the slightest. I tried to express how I felt about this book to a huge fan of drag queens and he asked “what did you expect?”. I really expected this to be funny and be able to follow a basic premise. I didn’t even have that high of standards because I know Willam’s best work is done when she is drunk or high. That alone should tell you I expected very little.
There was a tremendous amount of fatphobia, transphobia, and classism throughout the book. Promoting eating disorders is not funny. Telling you to ditch your friends because they aren’t trendy enough to be in pictures, what? Actively saying that penises are the only body part that matter and equating malehood with penises, despite pretending to be trans friendly. I can go on for days about my issues with Willam and trans people, which I have been able to ignore but recently this has started to become such a large problem that I can no longer justify it by saying it is all an act and that people see how ignorant she is being so they understand it is bad. Instead it is now feeling like she uses trans as an insult so often that it is becoming more acceptable to just call an ugly drag queen a trans woman because all trans women are ugly (there are multiple jokes about bathrooms in the book that just left a bad taste in my mouth even). There was a section of the book that talks about how she won’t use the term tranny, but she ALWAYS says her version of trans, which just struck me as asinine how she says it. So what that she is missing the ending. She has turned trans into a slur to be funny.
If I never hear another dick or poop joke again, it will be too soon. I know what Willam is like and what humor to expect, but even this was lower than I expected. I agree with Rhea Litre, I would love to have Willam write a memoir. I would give Willam another shot for a memoir, but I am starting to think I have outgrown Willam, even though she has the best boat. BGB.