Self-Sabotage: And Other Ways I’ve Spent My Time

Self-Sabotage is Jeffery Self's first book for adult readers — a memoir-in-essays tracing his journey from small-town Georgia through the theaters, comedy clubs, and bedrooms of New York and Los Angeles. Self is an actor and comedian who brings a talent for the precisely wrong observation to essays about chasing something indefinable across multiple cities and several failed attempts at something big. The book is funny, candid, and unexpectedly moving about the specific kind of exhaustion that comes from wanting things intensely.

Self narrates his own essays, and the result is exactly what it should be — a comedian reading his own material with the timing and self-awareness he has spent a career developing. His delivery captures the book's tonal complexity: the jokes land, and so do the quieter moments of reckoning with the gap between ambition and result. At just under seven hours, the audiobook is tight and consistently engaging.