Humorist Dan Zevin Turns Life
Experience
Into Literary Career
By Susie Davidson
CORRESPONDENT
Dan Zevin, professional hair model
and Cambridge resident, has recently authored “The Day I Turned Uncool:
Confessions of a Reluctant Grown-up” (Villard), a highly acclaimed memoir
consisting of hilarious essays detailing his transformation into a veritable
middle-aged loser. It’s actually the third in a trilogy of silly yet
serious tomes based on the life of a modern-era Peter Pan, who chronicles his
various stages of attempted maturation in a universal and entertaining manner.
Zevin appears to have latched onto
a literary niche, writing for various major magazines including Rolling Stone,
Details, and even Glamour, for which he is currently penning a piece on "Men
Who Won't Grow Up." He’s a comic correspondent for National Public
Radio's WBUR and a columnist for Boston Magazine; he also teaches a magazine
writing class at Emerson College. And, he conducts a “crash course on
post-college coping” at varied national educational instutions; his
course description covers such topics as “How to write a cover letter,
how to live with Roommates From Hell, and how to have Real World, uh,
Relations.”
Zevin, a New Jersey native, moved
to Davis Square in 1987 following graduation from NYU. “This was when the
only thing happening there was Barnaby's Pub, now Redbone's Barbecue,” he
recalled. “I took the only job I could find: gear and equipment editor of
Walking Magazine. (‘Do you know how much gear is involved in
walking?,’ he asided. ‘Shoes and shoe laces. That's about
it.’) It was a really really funny job.”
Zevin proclaims the happiest day
of his life as the opening of the Someday Café, where he still does a
lot of writing, enough to warrant acknowledgment in his books.
So what’s behind the
Someday’s accountability? “The first one,” said Zevin,
“‘Entry-Level Life,’ is a humor book about life after
college. The next, ‘The Nearly-Wed Handbook,’ is about planning a
wedding (the subtitle is ‘How To Survive the Happiest Day of Your
Life’). And the third in the trilogy is ‘The Day I Turned
Uncool’.”
“’Uncool,’ set
entirely in Cambridge and the Boston area, “is a humor collection of
comic ‘confessions’ like ‘I take pride in my lawn,’
‘I played golf,’ ‘I spend a great deal of time engaged in
home-improvement activities.’ Basically, it's about a formerly young,
single guy who lived in a Somerville apartment furnished entirely in milk
crates who wakes up one day to discover he's turned into an old married guy
with a mortgage, a dog, a lawn he's become obsessed with, and a special shed to
store his garbage cans.
“That guy is me,” he
readily confessed. Married to Megan Tingley, who edits children's books, the
couple have lived in North Cambridge for five years. “In the book, I
write a lot about how we bought this ‘starter home’ when it was a
total junkyard. The back yard was covered in asphalt, complete with a car up on
cinder blocks. The interior was like a lunatic asylum. Instead of kitchen
cabinets, the former owners had hung metal buckets to store stuff, and instead
of a floor, there was a huge piece of plywood covering the sand underneath. The
walls and ceilings were covered in crayon drawings. So I write a lot about
moving into a fixer-upper and its accompanying nervous breakdowns.”
“Uncool” includes a
chapter on the Emerson gig. “I write about how I always feel much more
like a student than a teacher,” he explained, “and how weird it was
the first time one of the students called me ‘professor’. It's
worse than the first time someone called me ‘sir’."
“Why am I a reluctant
grownup?” Yes, we were going to, or were afraid, to ask. “Maybe it
has something to do with living in the Boston area, which is so clogged with
college students that you feel like a dinosaur by the time you hit 30. It's
like there's a secret paddywagon that goes around the city and collects anyone
who has gray hair or something. This city is like never-never land, with its
constant influx of young students who tend to skip town the second they
graduate. It keeps you young in a lot of ways, which is good, but it also makes
you feel really old before your time.” (Zevin is “37 going on
17”).
So…is he categorizable?
“It's not like I'm Isaac Beshevis Singer or anything,” he
responded, “but I suppose some people might lump me into that
classification known as Neurotic Jewish Comic. Some reviewer described me as
the Jewish P.J. O'Rourke. Maybe I'll change my name to P.J. O'Zevin.”
Future plans: “I'm turning
‘The Day I Turned Uncool’ into a one man show called ‘Uncool,
Unplugged.’ Sort of like Spaulding Gray. Other news: ‘Uncool’
recently hit number five on the Boston Globe bestseller list, and USA Today and
Time magazine both gave it rave reviews. Universal Pictures just bought the
movie rights. They're talking about someone like John Cusak playing the part of
me, but I'd rather they found someone who looks more like me. A Brad Pitt type,
you know?
“I tend to write about those
stressful life passages that nobody else thinks are funny. But hopefully, my
books offer some comic relief.”