Mentally Incontinent: That Time I Burned Down a Hooters, That Time My Stalker Crashed on My Couch, and Nine Other Stories from My Weird Life [Paperback]

Joe Peacock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 3, 2009

Cyberspace?s answer to David Sedaris: raucous recollections from a man with a serious blabber-control problem

Joe Peacock is one of those rare people to whom interesting things just sorta happen. For the amusement of his friends, he?d often recount in long e-mails his latest misadventure, whether it was witnessing an armed robbery or being vomited on during his first sexual experience. In 2002, he started collecting those stories on a Web site he founded, mentallyincontinent.com. Soon he had a large following of visitors, including a rabid core group who suggested edits and helped him hone his writing craft. In 2005, he self-published the best stories from his site as a collection and in the years since he?s been holding impromptu readings across the country, selling thousands of copies (mostly out of the back of his truck).
In Mentally Incontinent, Joe delivers a batch of hilarious and brand-new stories, featuring his misadventures with a stalker, his blind date with a fifteen-year-old, and his frustrated attempts to convince his mom that he?s not gay. A natural storyteller and a self-proclaimed magnet for weirdness, Joe Peacock has emerged from the bowels of the Internet with some interesting tales to tell.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

To determine seven of the 11 stories included in this blog-to-book collection, Atlanta artist and internet presence Peacock asked the fans of his website, mentallyincontinent.com, to vote for their favorites, "So if you hate one (or all) of them," he writes, "blame the voters." Readers will likely blame Peacock anyway. Giddily dark throughout, and with a proudly juvenile sensibility, one typical Peacock adventure finds him using a corporate expense account to buy an extravagant full back tattoo-"the largest individual symbol of my newfound sense of daring"-only for the tattoo artist to get hit by a bus, and die, after the first part of a multi-week process. Another finds him setting fire to his best friend's pants, while he's still in them, inside a moving vehicle (his dad's VW Vanagon). Though he moved enough copies of the self-published version to merit this mainstream publication, Peacock's Jackass-style antics fall flat on the page; one gets the feeling that, like many blogger-authors before him, Peacock is his own biggest fan.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Peacock makes it clear up front: all of the stories in this rather weird book are the result of a collective editing and writing process that involved about 5,000 readers of his Web site, mentallyincontinent.com. So, while we can safely presume these tales of misadventure and weirdness are based on things that happened to Peacock, we should probably also presume that they might have been tweaked, or lightly fictionalized, for the purposes of comedy (or simply to protect the identities of the people involved). These are episodes from what must surely be one of the more un-charmed lives. Peacock strikes up a conversation with a woman on the phone, and she begins calling him at home and eventually comes to stay at his house (uninvited). Peacock gets roped into a blind date and discovers he has been paired up with a 15-year old girl (he’s 21 at the time). Peacock plays a harmless game (yeah, right) with matches and nearly burns down a Hooters restaurant. And so on. Told with good-natured humor—the guy really can’t believe this stuff keeps happening to him—the stories are a lot of fun, and will probably point readers in the direction of the author’s Web site, where all this craziness began. --David Pitt

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Gotham; Original edition (November 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592404820
• ISBN-13: 978-1592404827
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #415,588 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

See, I have no idea what to put as a biography. I write about myself, so obviously I think my history deserves at least two volumes of 250+ pages each. So I'll try to keep it short:

I dropped out of college my first year so I could design and build websites, since it paid way more than it deserved (in 1996, HTML could net you a real salary. Insane) and I hated sitting through English Lit classes that forced me to read books I read when I was 9 (Huck Finn? Really? In college? What the hell...). I'd tell coworkers or friends at parties all these retarded stories that happened in my life, and it was suggested I put them out on the internets, so I did that. And people started reading, for whatever reason.

In 2005, I self-published my first book, Mentally Incontinent, composed of those stories. The book contained the highest-voted stories from the site (the first "crowd-sourced" book, to my or anyone's knowledge). It sold some copies and got the attention of some great people who helped me put out my 2nd book, also called Mentally Incontinent (but with all new stories). The editors at Gotham / Penguin think it's nice, so you should buy it solely on that merit. Or, read the whole thing for free (as well as the first book) at http://www.mentallyincontinent.com.

Outside of writing, I still design and build websites, I play football (not this season, since I'm all authory right now), compete in MMA tournaments and stuff, collect anything based on Akira, write comic books that never get published, and can totally kick your rear in Tekken. I even have trophies. For Tekken, not MMA or football, since I suck at those.