You're Embarrassing Yourself

by Desiree Akhavan · 2024

In *You’re Embarrassing Yourself*, writer‑actor‑director Desiree Akhavan pulls back the curtain on the moments she was told to keep quiet. Across seventeen candid essays she recounts everything from being crowned the "Ugliest Girl" in high school and enduring a parental‑mandated nose job, to losing her virginity to a stranger in a support group for self‑harm. With razor‑sharp humor and unflinching honesty, Akhavan explores the perpetual quest for bodily peace, the tug of immigrant roots, and the anxious underbelly of artistic ambition. The result is a wildly funny, deeply heartfelt chronicle of an outcast’s rise to indie darling and the messy, glorious process of becoming a self‑aware adult.