Little failures add up in Shteyngart's memoir

This book is for everyone who struggles, whether with the external forces of the physical world or the internal arguments of the mind. Oh, and it's also funny.

Gary Shteyngart's memoir "Little Failure" explains everything about him and, in the process, explains the lives of everyone who's ever been out. You know, people who wear the wrong clothes or speak with the wrong accent or who have parents who JUST DON'T GET IT because they've struggled, too. People who are in will never understand, although this memoir does a pretty great job of trying to get them to.

Before reading "Little Failure," I had had two other completely opposite experiences with Shteyngart's writing: I began to read "Absurdistan" and disliked it so much I gave up; and I read "Super Sad True Love Story" and think it is perhaps the best book of its time about its time. (If you want to laugh at every single element of cultural folly in present day America, read "Super Sad.")

"Absurdistan" was too cruel for me. The level of selfishness and meanness did me in and made me give up. But what I didn't know then was that "Absurdistan" and Shteyngart's first novel "The Russian Debutante's Handbook" are drawn so closely from his absurd/Russian life that they are almost hallucinatory versions of "Little Failure," the title of which comes from his mother's affectionate esteem-squelching term for him.

As I closed the book on the final page, I was left to nurse a pounding memoir hangover: Wow. What a life. What struggles. We are carried through his Soviet-era childhood that finishes up as an American childhood, teenhood, college life. It is nothing like my own life, yet so much like my own life.

My parents were old. They grew up in the Depression. They raised me in the 1970s and '80s era of designer labels and excess. I was out. Very out. And while I wasn't sent to school looking like a baby Russian bear (in a smelly fur coat) and I didn't have a language barrier, there was meanness in my life and the internal struggles that came along with it.

There are others of you out there, too. You'll like this book. In between laughing and cringing and maybe crying a little, you'll cheer for Gary. Each life has little failures that can add up. And in Shteyngart's case, they add up to success that can encourage us all.