Sara Benincasa

Many of us have, at some point, asserted that we “don’t feel like leaving the house.” It may take a few days, several long naps, and many hours of Criminal Minds reruns, but eventually most of us manage to get out the front door and back to our regularly-scheduled lives. Sara Benincasa, not so much. You may know Benincasa from the spot-on Sarah Palin impression  she perfected back in 2008, or perhaps from her take on a vlogging Peggy Olson.  Perhaps you’re heard the sex-and-relationship show she formerly hosted for Cosmo Radio on Sirius XMchannel, or tuned in to the more mental-health-focused “Sex and Other Human Activities,” podcast she currently hosts with fellow funny person Marcus Parks. Or maybe you’ve seen her sharing a bathtub with luminaries like Margaret Cho and Donald Glover on her web chat show, Gettin’ Wet with Sara Benincasa. 

But, as revealed in Benincasa’s new memoir, getting out in the world has been both more difficult and more mordantly funny than you might imagine. Based on her one-woman show of the same name, Agorafabulous! Dispatches from My Bedroom is the story of how one girl’s anxious, clenched-sphincter childhood blossomed into adolescent panic attacks and then, as a college student, into full-blown agoraphobia. Along the way, there’s public embarrassment (Benincasa’s panic attacks curtail a school trip to the beach, to the chagrin of a tanning-obsessed gaggle of New Jersey mean girls), family confusion (at the hight of a panic attack, she subjects her mother to four and a half hours of the same Dave Matthews Band song) and cereal bowls full of urine (at a particularly challenging juncture during college, she developed a fear of toilets.)

There’s also a revelation: This is not a recovery narrative, and Benincasa isn’t cured by a new medication, a folksy Robin Williams-esque medical figure, or the love of her life. She’s here, she’s got irrational fear, she’s used to it.