Interviews
Related to TICKLED
THINGS PEOPLE ARE SAYING
ABOUT THIS BOOK:
“Goddamn! This book is so fu*king smart & wise & good. It’s brilliant & profound, yet somehow utterly relatable. Almost every sentence blew my mind. It actually changed the way I look at the world.”
—Kristen Johnston, Emmy Award-winning actress and author of Guts: The Endless Follies and Tiny Triumphs of a Giant Disaster
“Given the choice, we’d presumably all do what we want all day every day forever. The problem is figuring out what that that is. Duff McDonald, one of the most acute chroniclers of this confusing time, has, in these pages, for the greater good, ditched habits that trap him in the slog, freeing himself to pursue, pursue, pursue, composing perhaps the most American book ever — what’s more American than a pursuit of happiness? — in the process. Tickled is a new kind of a travel diary, a cultural exploration into the preconceptions and inherited beliefs that prevent us from reaching our potential and being free. A lot of us think we know exactly who and where we are. Duff McDonald is still on the road, heading for another joint.”
—Rich Cohen, author of The Fish That Ate The Whale and Pee Wees
“With heart-centered honesty and an unflinching eye for the truth of his own failings, Duff takes us on his journey from skeptical cynic to loving adult. Driven by a fierce love and appreciation for his daughter, the wizardly "M.," Duff shares the story of being forced by the pandemic to stand still long enough to see his real work: Growing up and away from a need for others to feel wrong so he might feel right. Having set forth to critically explore our collective need for precise and correct outcomes, Duff comes to see that — beyond right ways, beyond wrong ways — the only outcomes that matter are those that actually work. And, more often than not, those involve the magical notion that that which tickles us can lead us to the thing that matters most of all: love. Tickled may not have been the book he set out to write, but it's definitely the book we're meant to read.”
—Jerry Colonna, author, Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up
“Duff does something astonishing here—he relinquishes the body armor that made him so successful as a business journalist and writes from the heart. It is brave and true.”
—Hugo Lindgren, former editor of The New York Times Magazine
“An honest and heartfelt expression of one man's search inside himself. I appreciate Duff's difficult but joyous discovery of the sweet inner peace that comes from being fully present in the here and now.”
—Chade-Meng Tan, bestselling author of Search Inside Yourself and Joy on Demand
“Reading Tickled was a revelation for me; It helped me understand what I've been doing all along: I've been tickling myself in a way that happens to tickle others. Despite the wonderfully whimsical flavor of the word ‘tickle,’ this is a very serious book about how to live our lives much less seriously. I've read several of Duff's other books and they're fantastic journalism, but here he takes a leap out of objective observation and into a kind of subjective and vulnerable expressiveness that reveals a much a more penetrating level of insight and truth. As a result, he's no longer offering up mere ‘food for thought.’ He’s now serving up a stick of conceptual dynamite, or perhaps it’s a shaken bottle of highly carbonated kombucha. Either way, somewhere around chapter six, it exploded, blowing my mind, and obliterating my blind faith in the cult of statistical quantification. When the dust settled, all that was left of my previously clouded brain was a calm sense of presence, and a feeling that can be best described as a ‘tickle.’ This will all make sense once you read the book, which I recommend that you do right now.”
—Chris Wink, Co-Founder of Blue Man Group and creator of Wink World