Accidental Playboy: Caught in the Ultimate Male Fantasy - Hardcover

Ueland, Leif

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0446527009 ISBN 13: 9780446527002

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing, 2002

Synopsis

A freelance writer learns what it's like to be a single, heterosexual guy in an unsteady world when he's invited to travel cross-country for six months on the "Playboy Bus" in search of the Playmate of the Millennium.

About this title

About the Author

Leif Ueland is the co-author of Road Rules: Passport Abroad (MTV Books, 1997), based on one of MTV's hottest shows, and is a contributor to the online magazine Nerve. Currently, he divides his time between New York and Los Angeles.

From Publishers Weekly

"I scan through the familiar terrain married, mother, 35C... until I come to the final section... She's written: `I volunteer as a pediatric AIDS worker, which I consider a great honor,' " details Ueland, as he notes yet another ironic, cultural incongruity in his job as the house reporter for Playboy's six-month national search for Playmate of the Millennium. If "35C" and "pediatric AIDS worker" seems to be a contradiction, so is Ueland and his job. He says he's "never been the Playboy guy," and he appears to have gotten this gig because, while working on his novel, he wrote a humorous article about his sexual insecurities entitled "Trials of a Gay-Seeming Straight Male." Indeed, Ueland writes at length here about his therapy sessions dealing with his identity crisis as a heterosexual male who desires women outside of the Playboy paradigm. When Ueland is at his best, this sometimes shapeless, on-the-road memoir crackles with fine, mordant observations, and he can astutely communicate his emotional disjuncture with this project: "I really am invisible, standing in the middle of the crowd. I watch mutely." But too often Ueland's epiphanies feel slightly shop-worn: "These girls, the Myras, Mollys, and Hesters you know what? I'm like them. They're just likable." Frequent name-dropping (Graham Greene, John Updike, Norman Mailer, Ernest Hemingway), while ironic, looks silly. In the end, Ueland learns that being a heterosexual male doesn't mean being a womanizer, but while his journey is often entertaining, it doesn't yield surprising insights.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0446527009
• ISBN 13: 9780446527002
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320