Everybody's Favorite: Tales from the World’s Worst Perfectionist

“Many have tried, and many will try, to capture the sweet, innocent insanity of life as a young girl during the ’90s and 2000s. None have come close to the comedic perfection Lillian Stone nails again and again in Everybody’s Favorite.” —Glamour, Best Nonfiction Books of 2023

From one of the Internet’s favorite self-deprecating commentators comes Everybody’s Favorite, a laugh-out-loud essay collection that tackles the relentless pursuit of perfection while navigating growing up in the early 2000s.

Lillian Stone—childhood evangelical, AOL girlfriend, and professional nail biter is always living on the edge of anxiety. From the pitfalls of a girl plagued by religious trauma, the incomprehensible yet unforgiving need for perfection, and a poorly-behaved twenty-pound beagle, Everybody’s Favorite is a refreshing story of what it means to pick yourself when the world is telling you otherwise. Still navigating the ins and outs of adulthood, accompanied by an obsessive-compulsive disorder that’s become an exercise in self-acceptance and thus compassion, Lillian has become an expert in fighting the urge to be someone else’s idea of perfect. In this laugh-out-loud essay collection, replete with cringe-inducing touchstones of an early-aughts girlhood, Lillian Stone recounts her quest to be everybody’s favorite.

Set largely during the early 2000s Ozarks, and peppered with Stone’s biting satire and gloriously self-deprecating personal anecdotes, Everybody’s Favorite is a wry, empathetic look at the chaos that ensues when we contort ourselves into an ever-changing assortment of socially acceptable shapes —only to fall out of place, twist an ankle, pee your pants a little, and realize that the pursuit of perfection isn’t really all that interesting.