The veteran host and head writer of the public radio show Live Wire traces her lifelong battle with anxiety and the year she spent challenging herself to face her fears.
Okay Fine Whatever is propelled forward by the compelling, self-deprecating, confessional voice of the narrator ... Hameister is a master of the self-humiliation scene ... Hameister sets out to embarrass herself, and is always a hundred percent successful ... Hameister’s quest for love weaves the book together and and brings it to a satisfying conclusion ... Funny, romantic, utterly charming, Okay Fine Whatever will particularly appeal to people who suffer from anxiety. In other words, everyone.
Hameister approaches each self-appointed challenge with an unflagging sense of humor that lifts even some of her safer choices ... Yet too often it seems a stronger narrative was cut for space and levity. Okay lags with an 11-page, Lysistrata-style condemnation of the Brazilian wax, a well-trodden tirade in which Hameister herself seems to go MIA, as if it were written out of obligation ... She writes movingly about the complicated way her first sexual relationship came to a gut-punching end, and her sparse description of her father's suicide—which she links to her OCD—is devastating and restrained.
Hameister is deeply, self-deprecatingly funny like this as she examines her fate as a 'professional nervous person”' ... But the core of these essays is a dreaded trifecta of anxiety, body image ('I will never be thin enough to be the fat girl in a movie') and dating, which Hameister tackles with admirable honesty and wit ... Courtenay Hameister’s Okay Fine Whatever is endlessly funny and brutally honest.
