My Life as a Goddess

June 18, 2018
Comedian Branum, known for his appearances on Chelsea Lately, combines sharp insight and self-deprecating humor in this sparkling collection of essays about life as a fat gay comic. “If you are at all interested in being a goddess, may I suggest starting this book by believing in yourself?” he writes, setting the theme for his story beginning with his childhood. Growing up in the farm town of Yuba City, Calif. (“not the good part of California”), Branum always felt out of place, particularly with a wild sister and an abusive, controlling father. He enrolled at the Univ. of California at Berkeley as a Republican, but the liberal setting influenced him. He next attended law school at the University of Minnesota, where, working at a small legal publication where his “job was to keep track of how much a dead baby was worth,” he developed his dark sense of humor. With sparkling prose, the author offers an inspiring treatise on the accomplishments of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (with U.S. v. Virginia “she got to write the gender equal protection decision she’d been asking for all those years”), observations on the anti-gay sentiments in 1983’s Eddie Murphy: Delirious (which he enjoyed as a young adult but disliked as he got older), and a heartfelt musing on being a closeted gay man dating women, and his own coming out. This is an incisive and witty memoir.