This Will Only Hurt a Little Audiobook (Free)

A hilarious, heartfelt, and refreshingly honest memoir and NY Times bestseller from the beloved comedic actress known for her roles on Freaks and Geeks, Dawson’s Creek, and Cougar Town who has become “the breakout star of Instagram tales…Imagine I Love Lucy mixed with a modern lifestyle master” (The New Yorker).

There’s no stopping Busy Philipps. From the time she was two and “aced out in her nudes” to explore a nearby (as her mother famously referred to her toddler jailbreak), Busy concerning this Will Only Hurt a Little is definitely headstrong, defiant, and decided not to lose out on all the fun. These characteristics led her to keep Scottsdale, Arizona, at the age of nineteen to go after her enthusiasm for performing in Hollywood. But much like her painful and painfully funny teenage years, running after her dreams wasn’t generally easy and sometimes hurt more than a little.

Within a memoir “that often reads like a Real World confessional or an open up diary” (Kirkus Reviews), Busy opens up about chafing against a sexist program rife with on-set bullying and body shaming, being right now there when friends face shattering loss, enduring devastating personal and professional betrayals from those she loved best, and struggling with postpartum anxiety as well as the challenges of motherhood.

But Busy also brings to the web page her sly sense of humor as well as the unshakeable sense that disappointment shouldn’t stand in her method—even though she’s knocked straight down both figuratively and literally (from a knee damage at her seventh-grade dance to a violent encounter in the set of Freaks and Geeks). The tough patches in her life are tempered by situations of hilarity and joy: leveraging a perfect impression of Cher from Clueless into her initial paid performing gig, assisting reinvent a genre with cult traditional Freaks and Geeks, getting fast friends with Dawson’s Creek castmate Michelle Williams, staging her own surprise wedding ceremony, conquering natural childbirth with the help of a Mad Males–themed hallucination, and of course, how her Instagram stories became “the most addictive factor on the internet right today” (Cosmopolitan).

Busy is the rare entertainer whose impressive arsenal of talents as an celebrity is equally matched by her storytelling capability, sense of humor, and clear observations about existence, like, and motherhood—“if you think you know Busy from her Instagram tales, you don’t know the half of it” (Jenni Konner). Her conversational writing reminds us what we should like about her on screens large and small. From “candid tales of celebrity lifestyle, mom lifestyle, and general Busy-ness” (W Newspaper), This Will Only Hurt a Little “can be everything we’ve been dying to listen to about” (Bustle).