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YouTube comedy star turns author

Courtesy+of+Tammy+Richards
Courtesy of Tammy Richards

“Grace’s Guide: The Art of Pretending to Be a Grown-Up” is a humorous look at the struggles millennials face as they become adults. Readers may recognize the author, Grace Helbig, from the YouTube comedy world, where she has almost two million subscribers and posts videos multiple times a week.

As college students, we’re all pretending to be grown-ups. It’s a strange in-between. We’re responsible for our own actions and decisions, but generally have no idea what we’re doing (or at least, I don’t). College is a helpful bubble to learn the skills we need to become full-fledged adults in the real world. Skills, like cooking or managing a professional life, are currently something of a mystery, but we’re trying.

For many of us, thinking about the future and facing the fact that we are no longer children is a topic stressful enough to make us curl up in our bed with ice cream to watch “Lizzie McGuire” episodes we downloaded off the Internet in order to ignore the impending doom of adulthood. Facing responsibility seems too scary.

Courtesy of Tammy Richards
Courtesy of Tammy Richards

“Grace’s Guide” offers a welcome relief from the serious tone that usually accompanies discussions of job interviews and tactics for coping with anxiety. Helbig takes the wit and humor that has made her YouTube channel so popular and transfers it to an amusing book that any college student could use in their dorm or apartment.

The book is filled with lists of tips split up into four categories: your professional life, your social life, your love life and lifestyle. The tips create ridiculous acronyms such as “A PICKY COP” or “ASIA SHAVED.” Some of them are helpful, some just silly. The anecdotes and potty humor give the tone of an older sister trying to help out a younger sibling. Who else would recommend, “Wrap yourself up in a blanket and roll around on the floor like a human taco” to manage your anxiety?

This book is an interesting look at the direction of YouTube content creators. Google (which owns YouTube) is working hard to convince both consumers and advertisers that YouTube is a valid place to spend one’s time and money. The increasing number of Internet personalities who are publishing books show that they are both embracing traditional media and demonstrating the strength of the Internet as a platform.

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This isn’t a book to read cover to cover; it gets repetitive to read list after list of tips, but it could work well as a coffee table book in a dorm room or college apartment. Sure, this book is partially “fluff” (an uncomfortable percentage of the book is filled with full-page photographs of Helbig), but there are real tips hidden among the jokes. “Grace’s Guide” is certainly more palatable, and less overwhelming than the thousands of results from a Google search of “how to throw a good party”.

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