Teaser Tuesdays – Straight White Male by John Niven

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of A Daily Rhythm.

Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page.
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers.

Here’s my teaser from page 25 of Straight White Male by John Niven:

“He could still remember the texture, the firmness, of the cloakroom girl’s rump through the thin cotton of her dress. Kennedy Marr would have taken two or three stabs to give you his daughter’s birthday, but he could give you chapter and verse on the ass of a girl he felt up, what, three years ago?”

I’ve only just started this book as I finally finished The Book Thief the other day (pretty drastic change in genres between the two!). So I had to flip through the early pages of Straight White Male to find a good teaser. Oh my – it was hard to find something that wasn’t completely filthy!

I’ve not read Niven’s Kill Your Friends but my hubby liked it and he got me Straight White Male last Christmas. I know it’s a satire on the film industry & novelists while Kill Your Friends was the music industry but it’ll be interesting to see how I get on with a book about a complete & total wanker as I really can’t stand assholes. But the book is meant to be pretty funny. We’ll see!

Here’s the synopsis for Straight White Male (from Goodreads):

Kennedy Marr is a novelist from the old school. Irish, acerbic, and a borderline alcoholic and sex-addict, his mantra is drink hard, write hard and try to screw every woman you meet.

He’s writing film scripts in LA, fucking, drinking and insulting his way through Californian society, but also suffering from writer’s block and unpaid taxes. Then a solution presents itself – Marr is to be the unlikely recipient of the W. F. Bingham Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Modern Literature, an award worth half a million pounds. But it does not come without a price: he must spend a year teaching at the English university where his ex-wife and estranged daughter now reside.

As Kennedy acclimatises to the sleepy campus, inspiring revulsion and worship in equal measure, he’s forced to reconsider his precarious lifestyle. Incredible as it may seem, there might actually be a father and a teacher lurking inside this ‘preening, narcissistic, priapic, sociopath’. Or is there…?