High Holiday Porn

From prepubescent masturbation to prom-night infidelity, Bayme—College Humor writer and debut memoirist—lays bare every detail of his hypersexual development as an Orthodox Jew growing up in the 1990s. Any reader familiar with the trappings of a religious upbringing will recognize certain key factors in Bayme’s upbringing: his dogmatically strict father, his long-suffering but loyal mother, pressure to fit in with subcultural norms, and an all-consuming obsession with sexual deviance in all its forms. Bayme supplies plenty of wrinkles to the template, particularly his rocky scholastic experience and early behavioral troubles, but the overall tale never proves overly notable. Though Bayme pursues self-deprecating humor in every page, his jokes are too consistently self-aware for their own good. The result is a memoir that seeks to (raunchily) entertain, but instead makes the reader uncomfortable—and less than interested in its subject matter. Agent: Laurie Abkemeier, Defiore. [em](Aug.) [/em]