by Lane Chasek
It feels like I’ve read too many celebrity memoirs this year. Granted, I’ve only read two, but that feels like a lot. And the fact that I’m reviewing them for a literary journal feels like a crime, but it’s a crime I’m willing to commit. Two experimental memoirs from Star Trek alums in less than a year? How could I pass that up?
Wil Wheaton’s Still Just a Geek isn’t a new book. It’s literally Wheaton’s 2004 memoir Just a Geek with annotations.1 Just a Geek is about 2004 Wheaton looking back on the life of 80s and 90s Wheaton, and Still Just a Geek stars 2020s Wheaton as he analyzes the Wheatons of the 80s, 90s, and early aughts.
Wheaton gets to do what every writer wants to do at some point: rewrite their own book. Or, at the very least, provide a writer’s commentary on certain passages and chapters. Anyone who’s ever published a book2 knows what I mean. Just a few short years can drastically change us as writers and as people, and it’s frustrating to encounter passages from our past work that we know could have been better. No writing is ever truly finished, and this sense of incompleteness is something writers always live with.
Though you probably remember Wheaton as the child star who played Gordie in Stand by Me or Wesley Crusher in Star Trek: The Next Generation,3 Wheaton also writes essays and stories, so he understands the struggles that writers4 face. He takes a long, hard look at his past writing and his past self. What he wrote in Just a Geek wasn’t always well-crafted, and sometimes he cracked jokes that he shouldn’t have. In Still Just a Geek, he forgives himself when he needs to, sets the record straight when he needs to, and scolds himself when he needs to. In one chapter, he makes a series of O.J. Simpson jokes that are just…awful. So awful that I won’t even quote them.5 Wheaton agrees that they’re awful, and he owns up to writing them. For that, I salute him.
Autobiography is a genre of self-reflection, so this auto-autobiography6 is ultimately a reflection on self-reflection. Even if you’re not part of the “geek” culture this book is intended for,7 Still Just a Geek is such an unusual take on the celebrity memoir that I would recommend it to anyone who’s interested in writing, not as a mere product, but as a lifelong project.
Allow me to close this review with something mind-blowing I learned from this book: The plural of LEGO is LEGO.8
1 Along with some of his blog posts from wilwheaton.net, a website which he’s maintained for over two decades.
2 Or even just a story, essay, or poem.
3 Or not. Maybe you know him from somewhere else. One of my friends who has never watched Star Trek knows him as "that guy from TableTop."
4 And humans generally.
5 Hint: Wheaton compares the way he was treated by convention organizers to O.J. murdering Nicole.
6 Does this sound awkward? Probably. But what else should I call it?
7 Disclaimer: I’ve never considered myself a “geek” or “nerd” and probably never will. Furthermore, I never understood the fascination with geek culture and “geek pride” that took off in the 2010s. I know this probably sounds ironic coming from someone who runs a Star Trek-inspired lit mag in his spare time, but understand that, unlike Wheaton, I’m part of a younger generation that was inundated with “nerdy” stuff from a very young age. By the time I learned my multiplication tables, everyone I knew was into JRPGs, anime, sci-fi, and high fantasy to some extent. In highschool, I knew cheerleaders who played EarthBound ROM hacks, wrestlers who read manga, and emo kids who grokked over fantasy football (Wheaton happens to agree with me that fantasy sports is one of the nerdiest pastimes ever created). I’m a snot-nosed late Millennial (or early Gen Zer, depending on which timeline you consult) who gets to take popular culture for granted, much like the young fish in the David Foster Wallace parable who asks, “What the fuck is water?” But I digress.
8 And like MF DOOM, LEGO is always written in all caps.
