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    How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater
    How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater
    How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater
    Audiobook10 hours

    How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater

    Written by Marc Acito

    Narrated by Jeff Woodman

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    From syndicated humor columnist Marc Acito comes a wildly inventive and hysterically funny novel that is equal parts Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Fame, Risky Business, Dead Poets Society and The Catcher in the Rye. It's 1983, and 17-year-old Edward Zanni wants to study acting at Juilliard, but his newly remarried father - who earns too much for Edward to claim scholarship money - refuses to pay. So, Edward enlists the aid of his creative theater pals to swindle the money from his father.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books, Inc.
    Release dateSep 14, 2004
    ISBN9781449800345
    How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship & Musical Theater
    Author

    Marc Acito

    Marc Acito's comic debut novel, How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship and Musical Theater won the Ken Kesey Award and made the American Library Association's Top Ten Teen Book List. It was also selected as an Editors' Choice by the New York Times and is translated into five languages the author does not read. The eagerly anticipated sequel, Attack of the Theater People, was called "the funniest thing I've read this year" by Jennifer Weiner (In Her Shoes). Marc is a regular commentator on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. His first play, Holidazed received its world premiere at Artists Repertory Theatre in Portland, Oregon.

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    Reviews for How I Paid for College

    4/5

    230 ratings17 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This was a super fun read. I highly recommend the audiobook.
    • 5/5
      A marvelous novel, full of silly fun and joyful delights
    • 5/5
      Edward desperately wants to attend Julliard, but when his father refuses to pay for his tuition, he must find his own way. What follows is a madcap adventure full of friendship and sex and musical theater and teenage antics. I was one of the Play People in high school, so much of this was very familiar to me (though my experience was far more chaste). Sure, my high school years were a good decade after Edward's, but some things never change. If you were a Play Person, you will probably get a kick out of this book. I did.
    • 4/5
      The little inside musical theater jokes take this pretty typical coming of age idea and make it a fantastically entertaining story.
    • 2/5
      This novel gave me a nightmare about being forced to ride through the Napa hills in the lap of a closeted gay teenage boy driving a motorcycle as his mass of shiny black curls flowed in the breeze. He wouldn’t let me off the motorcycle. I wish I were kidding.

      My overall impression of this novel is that it was both aimless and horrifying. There is not a scruple to be found amongst the main characters of this cynical, oversexed ode to theater life in 1983 suburban New Jersey.

      Edward Zanni is a large Italian-American boy with an even larger singing voice, about to enter his last year of high school before moving on to Juilliard to pursue his musical theater dreams. His ample-in-every-way pal Paula precedes him and he is left to cobble together a social life from the remaining Musical Theater rabble. He scrounges up: his ex-cheerleader girlfriend Kelly (who he routinely dry humps in front of students and faculty alike), jock-turned-actor Doug whom he would also like to hump, ever-present tagalong Natie “Cheesehead” Nudelman, and terminally glamorous Persian transfer student Ziba. This cast of clowns makes a real mess of the book as they clumsily try to have sex with one another in varying configurations, regularly defile a ceramic Buddha (which serves as a motif for the chapter headings), and perform various theater-related tasks in between. Edward’s arts-oriented mother is MIA, having split to find herself years earlier and recently gone off the radar in South America, leaving him to contend with a business-focused father and drug-addled sister.

      When Edward’s father abruptly remarries, to a gold-digging German photographer, Edward finds himself edged out of his home and sans one financier for his college education. Luckily his friendship with Natie the Cheesehead has really taken off, because it turns out that Natie is a devious mastermind who develops an evolving strategy to raise Edward’s tuition money via a mix of good old-fashioned hard work (to which Edward is ill-suited, of course) and felonious white-collar crime. The whole gang gets dragged into the hijinks, including Paula up at Juilliard, and things get crazier and crazier right up to the bizarre ending.

      The story is not exactly bad, I did finish the whole thing after all, but it is definitely a lot of book. The writing is good but many of the things that are supposed to come off as funny just seem cruel, gross, or (worst of all) stupid. Edward is pretty hard to like despite his struggles with his sexuality, abandonment, self-worth, and even impotence. If he doesn’t want to have sex with a peer, he looks down on them. If he does want to have sex with a peer, they are nothing but an empty vessel for the fulfillment of his carnal desires. For all his nastiness he is rather cowardly. I could see this novel appealing to a certain kind of person who feels very outside: someone with a big personality, struggling with non-hetero-normative sexuality, who really loves the theater and is very self-absorbed. When Edward wasn’t ignoring his father he was making close-minded cracks at his expense, so I found his entitlement issues in regard to college tuition a little hard to take.

      The strongest part of the novel is probably the fact that Edward grows up a lot by the end of it. He is able to see the friends he has cast into various stereotypes as real people put on Earth to do something other than fill the stage of his life. He finally gets to know Kelly as a person with personality and talent rather than a stock “pretty girl” who fills out a pair of terrycloth shorts really well. The much-maligned Natie seems destined for things much greater (and perhaps more terrible) than any of the others. So it goes as well for Ziba, Doug, and to a lesser extent Paula.

      This is not a bad book but it’s graphically sexual, holds nothing sacred, and is at times just plain mean. I usually read YA to avoid these kinds of attitudes. The fact that Chuck Palahniuk recommended the author for publication says a lot about the novel's sensibility, but I can’t agree with the claim that he is a “gay Dave Barry”.
    • 5/5
      Wow, I think this book was written directly AT me. By turns hilarious, poignant and absurd, it chronicles the way Edward stumbles through his senior year of high school and lurches towards Julliard. Firmly anchored in the 1984 I remember, full of fumbling and humiliating yet adventurous sexual escapades, true-life misunderstandings and completely whacko blackmail schemes, this audio book had me weeping with laughter multiple times. Not for the faint of heart, nor for those who like their lovers always in pairs, or their teens law-abiding. I loved it and considered breaking into the library tonight for the sequel. The narration is excellent. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      This, I loved. Self-absorbed and pretentious as the narrator is – as you would expect a drama student to be - he's also funny, outrageous and charming, as well as casually and randomly bisexual. So are his assorted friends. Think the kids from 'Fame', but with more sex and drugs and – er – Frank Sinatra.
    • 1/5
      I only read this book because Aaron thought the title sounded funny and bought it for me for Christmas. The writer is obviously a talented writer but the book is full of immorality, full of it.
    • 4/5
      How I Paid for College is a rollicking romp punctuated with eccentricity and art. Acito's characters grow on the reader like a charming fungus, and by the end of the book one is deeply invested in rooting for their success. Edward is the East Coast bisexual theater version of C.D. Payne's Nick Twisp. Perhaps the best thing about Acito's writing is the way he manages to portray the characters' anguishes - unrequited love, fading dreams, and disappointment, while maintaining a mood of fun and irreverence.
    • 3/5
      It’s the 1983-84 school year and Edward Zanni of Hoboken has to figure out how to get into, and then to pay for, Juilliard when his father insists that he’ll only pay for a business major. Fortunately, he’s got friends; unfortunately, their ideas tend towards the felonious. A bunch of comic setpieces strung together with bare connective tissue. The characters were all trying too hard to be charming, which makes them typical teens but no more fun for that. Bonus for varying sexualities among the teens, but points off for a 2004 novel in which Edward’s 1984 observations are way too precious (Madonna’s a flash in the pan, what does that Matthew Broderick fellow have that I don’t, etc.).
    • 5/5
      Theater geeks of all ages will enjoy this coming-of-age novel. Even non-theater geeks like myself can enjoy it. It's the funniest book I can remember listening to in a long time. One word of warning advice to young people who read this book. Don't try these things at home (in real life). This is fiction with a happy ending. Real life doesn't always work out that way. I've heard it said that great works of literature speak to each other. Toward the end of this book there is an example of "not-so-great literature" (i.e. this book) speaking about great literatue. There's a lengthy discussion toward the end of the book about the book, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," by James Joyce. The scene is a class room of high school seniors who have just been given an assignment to write a paper about who they are now in the same spirit of James Joyce's "Portrait..." which they have just finished reading. The protagonist thinks to himself that he is so much like Stephen Dedalus (the main character in Joyce's "Portrait...").Oh by the way, the book "How I Paid For College" has way too much sex in it for me to recommend to anybody else to read.
    • 1/5
      ...Meh. I finished it and I was interested in how the plot was going to resolve itself which is more than I can say about some books (Adverbs, I'm looking at you). That being said, I didn't find this book to be particularly well-written or compelling. It's the story of a kid in New Jersey who wants to be an Actor (he's Very. Serious. about his acting) so when he's accepted to Julliard and his father refuses to pay for it, he resolves to stealing the tuition from his stepmother (who stole it from his father in the first place). The entire plot is so wholly unrealistic and fantastical - it's almost like the author is writing the story of how he wishes his senior year in high school had been. The most popular jock in the school befriends him and his weird drama friends (they call themselves "Play People" ) and brings the most exotic and beautiful girl in the school along, and they have a summer full of mischief and fun and pranks and then graduate to group sex and homoerotic wrestling. Seriously, when he admits that he's in love with Doug (the jock) and tries to convince Doug to let him give him a blowjob, Doug is like, "No thanks, dude. I'm straight. But let's be really good and close friends, ok?" That would NEVER happen in high school. Never in a million years. In reality Doug would react with horror and tell all his jock friends about what a queer the main character is, and they'd likely beat him or at the very least ostracize him. There would be no three-ways with hot girlfriends. Then at the end Frank Sinatra shows up. All in all, I can't say I recommend it.
    • 5/5
      This book was more engaging than any other book I've read in the past few years.

      It does indeed include sex, theft, and musical theatre (along with drugs and blackmail) which is probably what made it so great.

      Well, topic-wise, that's what made it so great. Also great about it is the author trusting the reader to get (or not get) the jokes. There's no immediate explanation, which I appreciate.

      This book is scandalous, but I loved it. I'm concerned that it may be too in-depth for YAs (LOTS of sexy stuff, some of it being of the gay variety), but I bet they do love it, but for different reasons.

      I'm curious to read other reviews.
    • 3/5
      I didn't find this book laugh out loud funny, but I did find it engaging and colorful. I liked the internal monologue that ran through the narrative voice and gave life to the story and I thought the plot had the right balance of zaniness and sweetness to make it both amusing and worthwhile.
    • 4/5
      This is a hilarious and very real coming of age story. It's set in the early 80s and yet it doesn't date itself at all, aside from the clothes, these characters could have been *my* high school friends. Although these highly realistic book characters weren't quite as depressed as most late 90s high school students... anyway...my friends were even theater geeks like these characters. Some of us even worked on a production of "Grease", and we did "Antigone" as well. My first urge was to say that the sexual exploits were a bit unrealistic, but then I remembered that these are theater geeks and pre AIDS. The part with the senator's son was a little ill making, especially since nothing came of it, but other than that the humor in the book delivered what it promised. The comparison to Ferris Bueller is accurate. But uh, is it my imagination though, or was the conversation with Natie about Christmas almost exactly the same as the one with Brian Krakow on My So Called Life? Was that meant to be an homage, or did the author just have that seep into his subconcious?
    • 4/5
      This is a typical first novel that succeeds entirely on charm. That's a compliment.
    • 3/5
      I'm trying to pay for college in creative ways so this book appealed to me, but it is really a teen book. A teen book with a whole lot of sex! Somewhat entertaining, but a little too frivolous for me.