Priyanka Mattoo's HOW TO BE LESS USEFUL Book Launch!

Priyanka Mattoo will be in conversation with Stephanie Danler!

A delightful book about reclaiming pleasure in mid-life—a potent mix of self-help and

memoir, from one of today’s wittiest, wisest voices.

“I have done everything right, and I have missed everything.”

When did our lives become entirely about efficiency and optimization? Especially as office

workers, as parents, as consumers, as exercisers and healthy eaters. Wouldn’t it be nice if we

could all be less useful? With self-deprecating humor, devastating insight, and bracing honesty, Priyanka Mattoo shares her own journey toward being a less useful human, to investigate why pleasure gets

back-burnered in American culture.

Think about what we choose to systematically cut out or overlook as we mature: Solo travel.

Dessert. Sweaty dancing. "Pointless" hangs with friends. And then there are the activities that

used to be fun and have somehow lost their luster, usually in the decade between 30 and 40:

Cooking (ruined by exhaustion). Bad tv (the algorithm). Other humans (bandwidth). Eating at

restaurants (Instagram).

Mattoo takes on the zeitgeist, delivering invaluable, laugh-out-loud entertaining life lessons

without an ounce of preachiness or pressure. She looks at where pleasure begins, what it

serves, how we learn to repress it—in families, in friendships and romantic relationships, in

jobs. And she shows us a way back: to identify and accept the things that give us pleasure,

then to welcome them into our lives. What if, instead of being useful, we could all learn how

to be happier, lighter, more present, more engaged? How to Be Less Useful is refreshing,

funny, sparklingly astute, unignorable--a book for the current moment.

Priyanka Mattoo is the author of the memoir Bird Milk & Mosquito Bones, as well as a

filmmaker and former Hollywood talent agent. She is a contributor to The New York

Times and The New Yorker, and a columnist at Vulture.

***

"f you’ve ever said to yourself, ‘I used to be fun!’ If you’ve struggled to relax, to ‘go with the

flow,’ to let people sort things out for themselves. If you’ve craved an earlier, less harried

version of your marriage, your life, yourself—this book is for you. In How To Be Less

Useful, Priyanka Mattoo shows us how to be less and have more: more fulfillment, more

authenticity, more ease, more joy.” —Maggie Smith, author of You Could Make This Place

Beautiful

“Time is a thief, and too often we aid and abet that robber by denying ourselves little joys, by

spending every minute of our one wild and precious life just trying to get to the next one.

Thank the gods that Priyanka Mattoo is here to remind us that living like that sucks and we

haven’t been sentenced to doing it. It’s okay for you to ease up and not always be ‘maxxing.’

This is a painfully relatable yet also hilarious chillout manual for cool people who want to do

and be more than their appointments and obligations.” —Samantha Irby, author of Wow, No

Thank You.

“Priyanka Mattoo has written the funniest and most resonant survival guide for anxious eldest

daughters everywhere. This is the liberating and necessary feminist manifesto for the modern

age of optimization. I am so grateful she has brilliantly articulated what so many of us have

been thinking: We need to do less.” —Bess Kalb, author of Nobody Will Tell You This But

Me

“Read this book, gift it, annotate it, dog-ear the pages, tattoo its wisdom onto your arms and

legs—Priyanka Mattoo is the older sister we all need in our lives.” —Diksha Basu, author of

Destination Wedding

“Generous. . . . Overscheduled readers will appreciate the permission she offers to slow down

and do less.” —Publishers Weekly

“A candid memoir of much-needed transformation.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Written with insightful wit and honest self-reflection.” —Lucy Yu, Electric Literature