Pure Innocent Fun

December 2, 2024
Keep It! host Madison pairs personal reflection with cultural critique in his irreverent debut. As a Black, gay kid growing up in 1990s and early 2000s Wisconsin, Madison clung to TV, music, and movies as guides to help him understand how to live. In “Being Steve Urkel,” Madison explains his theory that “the sitcoms you watched in your formative years tended to mirror the family unit you wish you had.” In “Oprah Ruined My Life,” he divulges how the talk show host’s emphasis on weight loss exacerbated his own struggles with body image. Throughout, Madison hits familiar beats of millennial nostalgia—he finds common ground with his straight peers through The O.C., while Jerry Springer offers a surprisingly robust queer education—but freshens them up with sharp analysis, highlighting, for example, the catharsis Jerry offered in contrast to his buttoned-up Black family. Not everything works, however. Madison’s somewhat excessive reverence for his idols (he writes of hating Coldplay because Chuck Klosterman does, then coming to love them in secret, only to gain permission after Beyoncé collaborates with them, “because baby, if Beyoncé loves Coldplay, then I love Coldplay”) lend the proceedings a slightly glib undertone. Still, there’s enough cheeky humor and genuine passion on offer here to satisfy pop culture junkies. Agent: Erin Malone, WME.

January 15, 2025
Musings on our pop-culture pasts. Blending memoir and pop criticism, Madison's essays lace deeply intimate stories with lavish praise and punishing blows for icons of the '80s and on. A critic, podcast host, and TV writer, Madison pulls few punches as he lures readers into a deep nostalgia. "The beauty of nostalgia," he writes, "is that most people forget the things that they hated about something they love." We remember a star or a show for a moment--a song or a scene that fixated us at the time, or simply because those were the people we told our friends we loved and so defined our lives. If this retrospective flattening offers us a more cohesive view of the past, then Madison is adept at re-creating the seamlessness with which media and real life can sometimes mesh. The memoir aspects of developing an understanding of his sexuality and self-image, parsing through family dynamics, and ricocheting between majority Black and majority white spaces in education are shot through with notes on Oprah, The O.C., Tom Cruise, the Power Rangers, and even Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars. Where the author pauses to pull apart the seams, he reveals an absurdity hidden beyond our memory. Madison's ability to re-create the limelight, then cast withering shade, is insightful. Writing of Cruise--"a soulless cipher skilled at mimicking human emotion"--he describes the actor as "approximat[ing] human behavior in a way that makes you think he'slearning how humans interact with one another, not merely observing and deciphering it like most actors." A brilliant critical voice for millennials, those on the cusp, or anyone who has had their eyes open over the past few decades, Madison proves a worthy successor to his own idol, Chuck Klosterman. An engaging and often hilarious memoir-in-essays from a pop-culture fiend.

COPYRIGHT(2025) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.