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Simon & Schuster
April 2009
On Sale: April 7, 2009
Featuring: Phil Camp
288 pages
ISBN: 1416599347
EAN: 9781416599340
Hardcover
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Humor | Fiction
Phil Camp has a problem. Not the fact that he wrote a parody
of a self-helpbook (Where Can I Stow My Baggage?)
that the world took seriously and that became an
international bestseller, or that he wrote the book under a
phony name, Marty Fleck, and the phony name became a
self-help guru overnight. Phil cannot be Marty Fleck. He can
barely be himself. No, Phil's problem is that he has been
walking with a limp for nine months. Phil is in constant
pain, yet there is nothing physically wrong with his body
that would cause such agony. This problem leads him to the
controversial Dr. Samuel Abrun, a real doctor who wrote a
real self-help book (The Power of "Ow!") that made
thousands of people pain-free. So what happens when the
self-help fraud meets the genuine item? Does he get better?
Can he hobble out of his own way to help himself? Most
important, can the reader make it through fifty pages
without thinking, Wait a minute. Is that a twinge I feel
in my lower back or just gas? Phil embraces Abrun's
unorthodox psychogenic theories passionately but manages to
save some passion for Abrun's daughter, Janet, herself a
doctor who has her own theories about, and remedies for,
chronic pain. If all this weren't enough, Phil tries to
delve further into his past with his unconventional
psychotherapist, the Irish Shrink, even if it means
revealing dark secrets he never remembered telling him the
first two or three times. To top it all off, Phil confronts
his alter ego's nemesis, right-wing radio blowhard Jim
McManus, only to find out they share a common enemy -- the
same family. Like Carl Hiassen and Larry David, author
Bill Scheft understands that the best humor is always
excruciating. That fits the story of Everything Hurts
and its lesson: Pain is the ultimate teacher. By the end,
Phil Camp, the self-proclaimed "self-help fraud," turns out
to be the real thing. And the real thing turns out to be
flawed and confused, but hopeful. In other words, human.
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