I have seen Dan Savage’s name mentioned here before and thought he might be an author I’d like I was at Barnes and Noble and looked him up but they had none of his books in stock so I will be getting them online. Since I won’t be able to flip through them I was hoping some of you who are familiar with him would offer your opinions of what his best books are, or if I should start in the order that they were written.
Can you also tell me a little about him and his writing? I love David Sedaris and Bob Smith, is Dan Savage a similar writer?
Dan Savage is primarily known as a syndicated sex advice columnist. He is gay and has adopted a child with his partner. As far as I know all of his books are non-fiction dealing with various aspects of his life and/or collections of his columns.
His recent project, in response to suicides of gay teenagers, has been the “It Gets Better” series of commercials, articles, etc.
From that perspective, I’d recommend you read a few of his columns (available online in many places but i generally read them in the Onion’s AV Club section. For the books, I’d pick one that the subject seems intersting versus reading in any order.
I love his columns but found his books intensely boring, sorry to say. If you care about the mundanities of lives then they might be interesting, but it was a mistake for me to pick them up.
Dan Savage is a sex and relationship advice columnist who produces a regular written column and audio podcast called “Savage Love”. I am a fan of his but if you’re not familiar with his work you should be warned that a lot of it is extremely explicit - he addresses everything from basic dating questions to the technical details of fisting.
I haven’t read his books but based on his other writing if you like David Sedaris you’ll probably like them. He’s got one about the quest (Savage is gay) to adopt a child. Savage is also responsible for launching the It Gets Better project, aimed at helping gay teens survive bullying and family abuse, as well as the whole “santorum” thing which I’ll let you Google (warning: icky).
I read his column every week, but I’ve only read one of his books, Skipping Towards Gomorrah. I did really like it though. I would certainly pick up another one, I just haven’t, yet.
He’s based in Seattle and his flagship paper is The Stranger, though he’s syndicated in independant papers all over (including The Reader). I believe if you go to The Stranger’s website, you can find archives of his column.
There seems to be two different Dan Savages. I’ve read two of his books (The Kid and The Commitment). I liked both those books. However, they seem nothing like his columns. His columns are very confrontational and explicit. His books are like, “So then Terry and I had breakfast, and Terry made me delete the next two sentences.” There’s nothing explicit, and while occasionally the books seem to present an agenda, they aren’t nearly as in-your-face. I suspect this might be Terry’s influence–maybe Dan is trying to respect Terry’s privacy–but for whatever reason, the books seem very toned down, and therefore less entertaining than his columns.
+1 for reading his columns.
If you have a cell phone you can download the Savage Love app, and it archives a LOT of his columns, complete with clicky words relating to the post you just read in case one of them appeals to you and you want to find more on that subject.
I will certainly pick up Skipping to Gomorrah myself.
He was on a ‘Live’ episode of This American Life a few years back here in Seattle. He told a really great story about his own life. Well worth the 15 minutes to listen to it. It gives you a sense of what he is like outside of his sex column persona.
You can listen to it here (Act Four. My Other Dog’s A German Shepherd):