14 • THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
BOOKS
THURSDAY,FEBRUARY 6,2003
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Relationship comedy lost on male audience
REVIEW
See my picture? It's the one right next to this review ... yeah, that's it. Glasses, beard, shaggy hair: That's me. So it should be pretty obvious that I'm a dude, and therefore definitely not the target audience to read Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid?: The Serial Monogamist's Guide To Love, by Carina Chocano. But, nonetheless, in the spirit of the upcoming Valentine's Day, I gave it a shot.
Regardless of target audiences, Do You Love Me or Am I Just Paranoid? takes a different approach to the relationship guide. Rather than taking a serious tone akin to romance advice guides such as Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, Chocano opts for a humorous approach.
Consider chapters such as "How to Flirt" and "What to Expect when Expecting a Call." In the chapter "When Thinking too much is not Enough," she lampoons people's tendencies to think too much
about every detail of a relationship and make mountains out of molehills. There's a part of me that wants to wonder if maybe I'm just not getting the joke here, but I think the more likely explanation is that most of these jokes just aren't that funny.
Regardless, Chocano should be given some credit for trying to create a different type of relationship-advice guide. Even though she falls short most of the time, you have to admire her ambition at least a little.
Aaron Passman apassman@kansan.com
But a brief note to the reader at the beginning of the book states that "this is a completely unreliable account of things that may or may not have happened to the author, her acquaintances, or her acquaintances' college roommates."
DO YOU LOVE ME OR AM I JUST PARANOID? ... C-
Now available from Villard Books
List price of $9.95
That sort of sums up the whole book right there: "completely unreliable," sort of clever, but on the whole not very funny or worth the time it takes to read.
This book seems to be getting a fair amount of press since its release in January, including a large spread in salon.com (for whom Chocano writes on a regular basis). Most of this probably has to do with people trying to capitalize on up coming Valentine's Day, but most of the press seems unwarranted.
Contributed art
There's nothing that exceptional here—Chocano's strategy for relationship advice seems to be just to joke about what people naturally worry about. Most people know that worrying doesn't really accomplish much, so why waste time and money on a book telling you what you already know?
Passman is a Towanda senior in journalism and film.
Read all about it on www.kansan.com
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