Oedipus Wrecked

By Kevin Keck

Book Overview

If David Sedaris were straight (or Margaret Cho were a man), they might be Kevin Keck. Keck mines the same rich vein of candid, confessional humor as these popular comics, but Oedipus Wrecked goes further in single-mindedly, hilariously recounting every grim detail of the author's almost absurdly varied sexual history. Keck pulls no punches in describing his endless, obsessive erotic experiments. In essays like Ass Backwards, Wet, Hot Presbyterian Summer, and I Was a Teenage Homosexual, Keck skewers his eccentric mother (whose dildo he swipes), documents his plunge into the chorus of coming on a sex party line, and limns a particularly outr encounter with a girl who demands he participate in water sports but won't have sex because that's a sin. For a driven horndog like Keck, sexual taboos exist to be broken. Still he always pays a price through numbing guilt or fear of discovery -- though neither prevents him from embarking on the next quest for love and orgasms. Keck's tableaux of sexual excess are rendered in vivid, unflinching language that marks the emergence of a new voice in contemporary humor that's both cuttingly comic and startlingly revelatory.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573442224
• ISBN13: 9781573442220
• Release Date: October 2005
• Publisher: Cleis Press
• Length: 125 Pages
• Weight: 0.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.1" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Great Collection of Personal Essays

This book was suggested to me by a friend who said she couldn't stop laughing as she read it. I don't laugh easily, but this is definitely the only book to ever make me nearly choke to death as I was reading it. It's easy, though, to overlook what a great writer Keck is and to think of him as just another memoirist with a series of funny anecdotes (or in his case a series of dirty jokes). These are well-written stories that actually reveal quite a lot about human sexuality and male anxieties. It should probably be required reading for every woman.

Whacked

Cute book about the author's misadventures, mostly as a teen, with his body during a long, drawn out adolescence. Though he often gets caught, a la Jason Biggs in AMERICAN PIE, from which Keck's humor seems to derive, he never lets societal scorn stop him from exercising his rights to be sexual any which way he can. Some of these events are more mortifying than others, and some of them more unbelievable. In a dozen teen sex comedies we've seen an incriminating sex tape wind up on TV during our hero's family viewing hour, so when Keck asks us to believe that this happened to him as well, we respond with the skepticism ordinarily saved for those who claim to have known the original girl whose date wound up hanging from a tree, his feet gently brushing the top of his parked car while she waited inside, wondering, where has he gone? But in general Keck is amiable about this, he actually doesn't care whether we believe him or not. He likes anal sex, with himself, and reading the opening chapter in which he reminisces about inserting the banana, the broom handle, the cucumber and the family's ice cream scooper, my eyes widened, while I thought wow, here's a guy Kevin who's had more up his ass than I have. Though he writes another chapter professing, "I Was A Teenage Homosexual," it's plain to see that his bent is really towards women, and he manages to have sex with four of them within a two year span, which is pretty good, no? Keck, a talented poet, has a deep Southern charm like THE DUKES OF HAZZARD or SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT, and he knows how to spin out a story. Nearly always he ends the tale before you're tired of him. I hope that OEDIPUS WRECKED is only the first of many Sedaris-esque memoirs from him.

Very Funny!

I did not expect it to be as funny as it was and also very honest. I loved it.

Hip, Smart , Funny

If you enjoy finely crafted prose, need a dose of hilarity, and aren't easily offended, then you'll enjoy this. The stories are based (loosely?) on the author's sexual misadventures. Keck sometimes seems incredulous recounting his own behavior and the responses it elicits in others. Well worth your dime and your time.

Funny and well written

I've been reading Keck's stuff since it first appeared on Nerve and have been waiting for this book to come out for months. Just got it the other day and read it from cover to cover in one sitting. It's probably the funniest book ever written about sex. If you're not offended easily (or even if you are) then get this book.