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.”