While Grant Stoddard's book, Working Stiff, is billed as "the misadventures of an accidental sexpert," this autobiography is most unfortunately flaccid. Where are the turgid members, the full round buttocks, the heaving bosoms? Following the "humble, hilarious, and delightfully salacious fish-INTO-water story of a young man who followed his heart-and other organs-into places where few would dare to venture," as quoted from the back cover, we get more of a story about a displaced Englishman who takes the only job available to him at the time than the salacious story of a man who worked for THE smut empire of the known universe, back when it was cool. There are a few funny stories about Stoddard's days at Nerve, writing the column "I Did It For Science," but there just aren't enough of them to make this a worthwhile read.
Stoddard mainly uses his book to detail the trials and tribulations he experienced whilst trying to procure U.S. citizenship, something that could be interesting to others in a similar situation, but not at all intriguing for those of us who picked up what they figured would be a down and dirty story about life in the Nerve headquarters. "Give us the DIRT, god dammit!" I kept muttering to myself as I flipped page after page of Stoddard's less-than-scintillating prose. As a Smut Mistress, I wanted to read all about the intra-office activities that put Nerve on the map as the sexiest place to work in America.
Instead I mainly read about a lot of Nerve employees doing their weight in blow. There are blowjobs here and there, but the overall feeling is that the Nerve staff did a lot more time searching out and doing drugs than they did actually having sex. To my mind, if cocaine is the sexiest thing you can think of, you're doing something horribly wrong with your life.
At any rate, Stoddard spills the beans about how he came to acquire this much-sought-after gig (by sleeping with one of the other columnists; how predictable!), and gives readers the bare minimum to keep them turning pages til the end of the book. It's unfortunate that it wasn't a more interesting read, but maybe he was saving the truly titillating stuff for the TV version of his life-which he mentions throughout the book, and seems never to have materialized.
If I were to rate this book on a scale of 1-10, I'd rate it a 3.5. It's not badly written, but it's also not what it pretends to be-kind of like Grant Stoddard himself.