Grant Stoddard

Grant Stoddard is only interesting because of his former job writing for Nerve. He knows this, so the book starts and ends with his unusual and perhaps metaphoric final assignment. Unfortunately, he can't write about his job, since he is/was engaged in a dispute with his former employer about who owns how much of those experiences.

Instead, in the pages in between, Grant tells us about being a loser who wants to score but can't in high school, then about being a loser who wants to score but can't in college. Then he meets an American girl, who sees through his loser ways to someone worth shagging. (I honestly don't know how. She may have been delusional.) He follows her home. He discovers that many American girls find accents cute and loses interest in the original one. There are visa issues, but a distinct lack of interesting hijinks.

Grant then becomes a loser who can occasionally score and works at Nerve. From what I've been told, his column was interesting.

From what I read in his memoir, Grant is a self-obsessed loser. His total focus on how much of a loser he is/was eventually caused me to believe it wholly, and he never redeems himself in anyway. By the end of the book, I could care less about him. May I recommend [book: Candy Girl] instead?… (mehr)

Wouldn't we all love to have a dream fall into our laps? And then to have the dream turn out to be enjoyable as well? Heaven!! Grant Stoddard falls into a job at Nerve.com writing a column on his sexual adventures called I Did It for Science. He gets placed into situations that the average person may not ever find themselves in, and then writes about it. Sploshing, Leather Camp, and a naked (but no touching) bridge lesson are all included here.

I enjoyed the book and Grant's tone, but I would have enjoyed reading more about three years of columns at Nerve. This didn't cover as much as I would have liked it to. Some of the adventures are in here, but it is more about his life in NYC. Fun.… (mehr)

Working Stiff would be an enjoyable book if the author seemed anything but horrified by his job. Grant Stoddard arrives in America with limited aspirations and sexual experience, but after winning a bizarre online contest to have sex with a married porn star, he becomes a sex columnist at the website Nerve.com. Thanks to his willingness to do a pornographer he met online, his editors are convinced that he's up for all sorts of sexual hijinks, and soon his job consists of conducting and reporting on a variety of sexual experiments. Young Grant tries out all sorts of public places (subway cars, orgies), unusual practices (like flinging food at sex partners), and mysterious toys (like getting pegged by a strap-on replica of his own penis). I read with growing horror as I realized that Grant enjoyed almost none of these things; in fact, his attitude ranges from deep unease to outright disgust at each of his experiments. Between chapters, he relates more uncomfortable anecdotes from his personal life, like the time he took the virginity of one of his sex column's readers, only to have her cry and ask if all sex was that awkward. I could never understand why Stoddard insisted on inflicting such miserable experiences on himself, much less why he would want to share the in a forum as public as a memoir. I couldn't make it to the end.… (mehr)