The Big Rewind

From the head writer at "The Onion A.V. Club," a painfully funny memoir as seen through the sturdy prism of pop culture--for fans of Chuck Klosterman and Augusten Burroughs.

As a child and teenager, Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape. As an adult, pop culture became his life. For more than a decade he's served as head writer for "The Onion A.V. Club," and here, by way of music, books, films, and television, he shares his too-strange-for-fiction life story.

Using a specific book, song, album, film, or television show as a springboard to discuss a period in his life, Rabin recounts his Dickensian upbringing with biting wit and brutal, perhaps unwise candor. Throughout a traumatic childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents, Rabin reveals that not only did pop culture shape and mold him, it helped save him from suicidal depression, institu- tionalization, and parental abandonment. Perhaps the most entertaining book ever written about depression and sweet, sweet sexual humiliation, "The Big Rewind" is also an emotional tale of a motherless child's search for family and acceptance and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin's irascible, lovable, hard-luck dad.

Featuring unexpected cameos by Billy Bob Thornton, a vomiting Topher Grace, and some dude named Barack Obama, "The Big Rewind" chronicles the surreal journey of Rabin's life, and its intersection with the dizzying, maddening, wonderful world of entertainment.