A heartbreaking and hilarious memoir, Dr. Brandon Day takes us on a 20-year odyssey of hellish introspection and painstaking self-discovery as he battles homelessness, addiction, bosses, teachers, cable companies, neighbors, his children, and his ex-wife to answer the existential question that burns inside all of us, "Am I the Asshole?"

By the time Dr. Brandon Day was six-years he had become addicted to Nintendo. Playing games like Mike Tyson's Punchout and Legend of Zelda to cope with his sadistic, overbearing parents who forced him to do unthinkable things like brush his teeth and finish his homework. As he grew older, Dr. Brandon Day realized that he was the victim of childhood trauma and that he was a hero. That was when he knew that he had to write a whiney memoir where he brags about himself too much and throws his parents under the bus like all of the other assholes who write best-selling memoirs. He knew that talking shit on his parents and humble bragging would be his only way out of the insufferable torture of middle-class. But upward mobility required crafting the perfect resilience narrative. He had to prove to himself and the rest of the world that he was an "overcomer," made stronger by all the bullshit he had endured at the hands of not only his parents, but other family members, friends, co-workers, teachers, pets, wives, ex-wives, bosses, cable companies, banks, and even his own children. However, the truth was more complicated. After he graduated from college, Dr. Brandon's mom and dad kept breaking his balls about smoking too much pot and finding a fucking job already. If only it were that easy. It wasn't long before they would eventually kick him out and even force him to pay for his own car insurance when he was just a young, scared, 26-years-old little boy.

Dr. Brandon learns to confront his own past filled with many secrets: a marijuana stash he hid in his sock drawer all through high school, phone calls from debt collectors who use strange numbers to try to trick him into picking up, dozens of lost car keys and wallets he never found, and sometimes even peeing in the kitchen sink when he is drunk, and no one is looking. All of which led to the unbecoming desperation of a 43-year-old man being forced to a reckoning with his own identity. Although Dr. Brandon would go on to graduate from college and become a high school guidance counselor, he found that sweet-ass summer vacations and a strong teacher's union didn't necessarily mean safety from judgment of his parents or the meritocracy. Both a chronicle of the American Dream and an indictment of it, this searing debut memoir exposes the price we pay for the promise of a bright future. Dr. Obama's story challenges our ideas of what it means to overcome—and live life on our own terms, even if those terms mean that you are an asshole.

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