The Big Rewind - A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture

As a child and teenager, Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape. As an adult, pop culture became his life. For more than a decade he?s served as head writer for 'The Onion A.V. Club', and here, by way of music, books, films, and television, he shares his too-strange-for-fiction life story.

Using a specific book, song, album, film, or television show as a springboard to discuss a period in his life, Rabin recounts his Dickensian upbringing with biting wit and brutal, perhaps unwise candor. Throughout a traumatic childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents, Rabin reveals that not only did pop culture shape and mold him, it helped save him from suicidal depression, institutionalization, and parental abandonment. Perhaps the most entertaining book ever written about depression and sweet, sweet sexual humiliation, 'The Big Rewind' is also an emotional tale of a motherless child?s search for family and acceptance and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin?s irascible, lovable, hard-luck dad.

Featuring unexpected cameos by Billy Bob Thornton, a vomiting Topher Grace, and some dude named Barack Obama, 'The Big Rewind' chronicles the surreal journey of Rabin?s life, and its intersection with the dizzying, maddening, wonderful world of entertainment.