The Big Rewind: A Memoir Brought to You by Pop Culture

(Paperback)

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Nathan Rabin viewed pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape throughout his childhood and adolescence. As an adult, pop culture became his life. Head writer for A.V. Club for more than a decade, Rabin uses specific books, songs, albums, films, and television shows as springboards for dissecting his Dickensian life story in his acclaimed memoir The Big Rewind.

Rabin writes movingly and hilariously about how pop culture helped save him from suicidal despair, institutionalization, and parental abandonment during a childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents. A fun book about depression, The Big Rewind is ultimately a touching narrative of a motherless childs search for family and acceptance, and a darkly comic valentine to Rabins lovable, hard-luck dad.

With comic dissertations on everything from The Simpsons to The Great Gatsby, and from Grey Gardens to Dr. Dre, The Big Rewind chronicles Rabins improbable yet all-too-true journey through life, and its fortuitous intersections with the dizzyingly wonderful world of entertainment.

Reviews

[The Big Rewind is] written with [Rabins] trademark humor, quirkiness and self-deprecation. Its an homage to pop culture." USA Today
Nathan Rabin had the kind of childhood that aspiring memoirists dream of. TimeOut New York
With his uncanny grasp of cultural zeitgeist, Rabin could unseat Chuck Klosterman as the slacker generations vital critical voice. Heeb Magazine

Author Bio

Nathan Rabin is a staff writer for The Dissolve, a new film website from the popular music website Pitchfork. Previously, he was the head writer for The A.V. Club, the entertainment guide of The Onion, a position he held until recently since he was a college student at University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1997. Rabin is also the author of a memoir, The Big Rewind, and an essay collection based on one of his columns, My Year of Flops. He most recently collaborated with pop parodist "weird Al" Yankovic on a coffee table book titled Weird Al: The Book. Rabins writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Spin, The Huffington Post, The Boston Globe, Nerve, and Modern Humorist. He lives in Chicago with his wife.