"You're Not That Pretty" & other things my parents told me  is an hilarious, scathing, yet often poignant memoir by Award-winning and Emmy-nominated writer, Debbie Kasper. This collection of stories begin in the '50s, in Debbie's chaotic family, and travel up to the eighties, as Debbie overcomes some of the worst parental advice doled out: ("Don't have children, you'll just end up hating half of them," and "Would you rather a poke in the eye with a sharp stick?") She barely escapes the three brothers who terrorize her with dangling reptiles and mice in her underwear drawers. 

She finds her self-esteem and her path, but along the way the adventures include: making best friends with a Mafia hit man's daughter, waiting for Herman's Hermits to show up at her 13-year-old birthday party, meeting her half-sister for the first time at age 12 (just in time to watch her go mad,) getting caught shoplifting dressed as a clown, fending off an international stalker who tracks her to England, getting busted in Germany, turning down a date with Billy Joel,  selling blood for money in graduate school, cruising the Caribbean as a comedian, the transvestite hooker who bled to death at her front door in NYC, and teaching her stoic mother how to cry.