In anticipation of the July 10th, 2009 release of Chris Columbus's high school comedy I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER, we've got an exclusive excerpt from the new paperback version of Larry Doyle's Thurber Prize-winning novel - about a nerdy high school valedictorian's wild night out with the girl of his dreams - on which the film is based!
You might've noticed that other sites have been debuting artwork from Doyle's tome today. That's cool. I haven't had the chance to look around, but I am very pleased with the two Evan Dorkin-illustrated panes that were selected for AICN's discriminating readers. Enjoy.
Like you haven't had that conversation fifty times before.
This version of the book will be available for purchase on June 9th, and it's well worth picking up if you haven't read it. If you're not familiar with Doyle's work, he's contributed some hysterical pieces to The New Yorker over the last few years and worked on The Simpsons as a writer/producer for four seasons. He also wrote for BEAVIS AND BUTT-HEAD, so chances are he's made you laugh very hard at some point in your life. Seriously, give the book a shot. I think you'll dig it.
And hopefully we'll all dig Columbus's movie when it opens next month. The trailer certainly looks promising.
Finally, I've attached Doyle's self-penned bio because it made me laugh.
Larry Doyle is a 1976 graduate of Buffalo Grove High School, the setting for I Love You, Beth Cooper. He was not the valedictorian like the book’s protagonist, ranking only 13th out of 500, although several of the students above him took pretty easy classes. The novel won the 2008 Thurber Prize for American Humor, and Doyle also wrote the film adaptation. Starring Hayden Panettiere and Paul Rust, the film opens on July 10, 2009 from Fox.
Doyle has wandered through a checkered writing career that has seen him reporting on the early AIDS epidemic and the Challenger explosion, doing comic strips and editing magazines, writing for the best television show of all time and winning two Emmy Awards for it (THE SIMPSONS), and scripting extremely expensive movies that lose gobs of money.
He currently makes his living writing screenplays and writes for magazines whenever he can afford it. He is a regular contributor to The New Yorker, and in the past, has contributed to Esquire, GQ, and was the editor of Spy.
Doyle lives outside Baltimore with his wife Becky, their three children and one dog, until it dies, and then no more dogs, according to the wife. The wife’s sister is married to Campbell McGrath, the famous poet who won a MacArthur Super Genius Grant, and once hit his brother-in-law in the face with an oar and then wrote a poem about it.
