Priyanka Mattoo’s HOW TO BE LESS USEFUL Book Launch! (in LA)

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.

Starts 7PM PT