Quick Take
- Narration: Pellegrino reading his own stories is the whole point; his comedic timing is precise and the emotional shifts in the later essays land because the voice is completely unguarded.
- Themes: Queer coming-of-age, 90s and early 2000s pop culture as survival mechanism, grief and identity in a small-town Midwest context
- Mood: Aggressively funny with unexpected emotional sucker punches
- Verdict: A memoir-essay collection that weaponizes nostalgia in service of genuine feeling, best consumed in the author’s own voice.
I spent a Saturday afternoon walking through a neighborhood I’ve been walking through for years, and for about three hours I forgot completely where I was because Danny Pellegrino was describing his relationship with The Nanny as a coping mechanism for being a closeted gay kid in small-town Ohio in the 1990s. That sounds like a very specific premise for a very specific audience. It is not. What Pellegrino does, across roughly six hours of personal essays read in his own voice, is use the specificity of his own experience as a lens through which something more universal about adolescence, difference, and the desperate alchemy of turning pop culture into a lifeboat becomes visible.
I should say upfront that I was not a Brandy fan in the 90s, I did not have strong feelings about Ryan Phillippe, and I came to Netscape Navigator later than most. None of this mattered. The Pellegrino method is not to require you to share his references; it is to describe his relationship to those references with enough precision that you recognize your own version of the same thing, whatever it was for you. That is the formal trick of the best essay collections, and he pulls it off more consistently than many first-time memoirists manage.
Growing Up Closeted in a Town Without Maps
The Ohio sections of this collection are the ones that do the most substantive emotional work. Pellegrino describes a childhood and adolescence without visible models of what he might become, without anyone in his immediate geography who was openly gay, navigating that absence the way a lot of queer kids navigated it in the pre-social-media era: through the parasocial relationships offered by television and music, finding in Fran Fine’s confidence or a particular Brandy lyric something that his actual environment could not provide. He is funny about this, but he is also honest about the cost of it in ways that arrive without warning.
One reviewer here used the phrase sucker-punched with feelings as a description of the book’s emotional rhythm, and it is apt. The setup is comedic. The comedic material is genuinely funny. And then, periodically, Pellegrino turns a corner into something about grief, or about the particular loneliness of being the only person in a room who is hiding something, and the tone shifts completely without any of the warning signals that usually signal a shift. That asymmetry is controlled and deliberate and is the primary reason the book’s emotional impact exceeds what its premise suggests.
From Salon, Ohio to Everything Iconic
The second half of the collection traces Pellegrino’s trajectory from Ohio to Los Angeles and the construction of his podcasting career, including the experience of eventually interviewing the same celebrities who had functioned as his surrogate community in childhood. This section is more conventionally funny and less emotionally exposed than the earlier essays, but it contains some of the book’s sharpest comic writing. The juxtaposition of his Midwest formation with his current context, interviewing Katie Couric or Cameron Diaz as a professional task, is handled with the same self-aware humor he brings to the retrospective material. He is not reverential about his own success in a way that would undermine the earlier vulnerability.
The reviewer who noted that the book has the texture of a warm hug is not wrong, but that description undersells the precision of the craft. A warm hug is incidentally comforting. This book is intentionally structured to make you feel received, which is a different thing.
Six Hours in Pellegrino’s Voice
The audio format is not merely compatible with this material; it is the correct format. These are personal essays that began as public storytelling, and Pellegrino’s timing, his willingness to pause before a punchline, to speed up when a memory accelerates, to drop his voice when something real is arriving, is inseparable from the writing itself. Reading this in print would be a different and lesser experience. The moments that drew the review praising the book as aggressively funny are moments of vocal performance as much as prose. His comedic instincts are calibrated for ears, not eyes.
The Right Temperament for This Collection
Anyone who grew up feeling like an outsider in their own geography will find something here regardless of sexual identity, because Pellegrino is ultimately writing about the general adolescent experience of reaching for culture as a surrogate for belonging. Millennial listeners will get additional enjoyment from the density of period-specific reference, but the emotional core doesn’t require the references. Listeners who primarily want narrative arc and sustained plot will find the essay collection format episodic in ways that require patience. Those who want a book that tells them what they are supposed to feel will be confused; this one trusts you to have your own reaction. For the right listener, that trust is its greatest quality.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to be familiar with 90s pop culture to appreciate How Do I Un-Remember This?
Familiarity helps with specific jokes and references, particularly around The Nanny, Brandy, Netscape Navigator, and various early 2000s cultural moments. But Pellegrino’s writing works even without the references because the emotional logic of using pop culture as an escape hatch is universally legible. Millennial listeners will get the most out of the period-specific humor, but the book doesn’t require it.
Is the book primarily comedy or does it deal with serious subjects like grief and mental health?
Both, interleaved without warning. The collection is built around a comic sensibility that is then periodically punctured by genuine emotional weight. Pellegrino discusses grief, the particular stress of growing up closeted, and mental health adjacent experiences with candor and without warning transitions. The humor doesn’t undermine the serious passages; the two registers inform each other.
How does this compare to other queer coming-of-age memoirs in terms of tone and content?
It sits closer to the comedic end of the genre alongside books like David Sedaris’s essay collections than to more testimonial memoirs. Pellegrino’s primary mode is humor with emotional depth underneath, rather than emotional depth with occasional lightness. Listeners who love Sedaris or similar essay voices will likely respond to this; those expecting a more straightforward narrative of identity discovery may want to calibrate expectations.
Is there a free audiobook version of How Do I Un-Remember This available, and is it author-narrated?
Yes, the free audiobook is available on Audible and is narrated by Pellegrino himself. Given that so much of the book’s impact depends on his comedic timing and vocal shifts between humor and emotion, the author-narrated version is strongly recommended over any print alternative.
