This Essay Collection by Catonsville Native Humorist Maeve Dunigan Should Be Your Next Local Read

At just 30, Catonsville’s Maeve Dunigan is a humorist, New Yorker contributing writer, and debut author. She majored in multiplatform journalism at the University of Maryland, but jokes that she spent more time than “anyone should” involved with the school’s sketch comedy group—which explains her recently published collection, a mixture of memoir and satire, Read This to Look Cool: Essays and Overthinkings.

Now residing in Brooklyn, New York, her work has also appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Reductress, the Mountain Gazette, and on NPR’s “Selected Shorts.” She co-hosts “Some Fun Lines,” a monthly open mic, and describes herself as a “proud world champion” of the fast-paced, low-stakes, comedy debate show, Abolish Everything.

Ultimately, Read This to Look Cool is an assemblage of coming-of-age stories. And why not? What’s funnier (in hindsight) than the awkward—trying to blend in and get noticed at the same time—years from junior high school to first job? Vulnerable and witty, this entertaining collection is hilarious at times and whimsical at others—and especially relatable for Gen Z and millennial readers.

In your opening essay, the description of the swimming pool where you worked as a lifeguard smelling “like Royal Farms fried chicken platters and Coppertone Sport sunscreen” is so funny and so suburban Maryland. And did moms really sneak airplane bottles of wine into the pool grounds?
[Laughs] I did genuinely find airplane bottles of liquor hidden in the women’s bathroom. You can only draw so many conclusions from that. If it’s children sneaking it in, that’s a bigger problem.

My favorite story is probably “McBurney’s Point,” where you pretend you are not having an appendicitis attack at a McDonald’s in order to project a laidback vibe with a friend who you haven’t seen in a while.
It was such a perfect encapsulation of me being the only person standing in my way, even when the stakes were, I mean, literally life or death. Like I, so stubbornly, wanted to maintain this air of being a girl who’s easygoing, carefree, a good hang, doesn’t flake on plans, that I was gritting my teeth through the worst pain of my life and just assuming things would be okay. Even now describing it, it sounds scary, but there is something funny about what that says about me.

Is there one essay in particular that friends or family have responded to?
Well, the Merriweather piece, “I Did This to Me,” [which chronicles a strangely religious and paranoid perception of Hozier during a concert after ingesting a seriously laced cookie]. The title is from a line in the 8th-grade health-class educational video mentioned in it, “Heroin Kills.” I’ve had a few people message me and say, “Oh my gosh, I completely forgot about that film, you’ve pulled a memory out of the recesses of my brain.” I’m always like, “Yeah, sorry about that.”

Let me ask about one of your New Yorker pieces. “What I Think Will Happen if I Go to a Bar and Order a Whiskey Neat” generated something like 1.5 million views on their website. Where did the inspiration for that spring forth?
I was out to dinner with my fiancé and it just hit me fully formed when I was ordering. It’s not necessarily a novel observation that people who order a whiskey neat seem really cool. But I thought how funny to play out that idea to the most ridiculous things I think could happen to someone who does that. I still think ordering a whiskey neat is cool, but I’ve never done it because I, unfortunately, think it tastes yucky.

You majored in journalism, which is interesting, because that’s essentially a writer pointing their focus outward. With memoir, and a lot of comedy, the focus is in pointing inward—to our often embarrassing internal responses to what is happening around us. Who have been your influences?
I pulled a David Sedaris collection off my parents’ bookshelf when I was 10 maybe, and read “Santaland Diaries.” I did not know writing could be that funny. I discovered and fell in love with the funny, personal essay immediately. Obviously, he’s up there. I think he’d be for any humor writer. One of my favorite all-time actress-comedians is Jenny Slate. She has written two books, and they’re both so funny, so smart, and so unique. Samantha Irby and her collections are so funny as well. I’d say those are three heavy hitters, inspiration-wise.

Your first writing—outside normal K-12 schoolwork—was One Direction fan fiction. In fact, that relates to your next book.
Yes. It’s a novel about a boy band that gets trapped at the top of a hotel by a horde of fans, and they start getting picked off, one by one, by a member who wants to be a solo artist. That’s next. It’s a genre that I’d describe as campy, funny, murder mystery.