More than 95,000 Twitter followers can't be wrong. When aspiring comedy writer Charlie McDowell got some impossibly noisy and airheaded upstairs neighbors, he probably never imagined that poaching their vapid lines would make him an online celebrity. Several years and a flourishing Facebook page later, McDowell is now a star in his own right--and he owes it all to the constant stream of nonsense pouring through his woefully thin ceiling.
The two party girls living above McDowell repeatedly spew lines of such stupidity (they wonder how much gluten cost before it was free) that you have to wonder if he's making it all up. McDowell swears he's not and he has even held "listening parties" so others could witness the girls rapping about sex, fake boobs and the Tic Tac diet. While it's all very comical, there's also something creepy about someone profiting off of eavesdropping on a pair of innocent dunderheads. (And how in the world do these women not realize there's a popular feed being written by their very own words?)
What McDowell incorporates into Dear Girls Above Me, though, is a touching tale about his loneliness after being dumped by his girlfriend and how the conversations upstairs get him though. There's a great subplot where he tries to force his roommate out of the closet and butts heads with his nutty landlord. Ironically, McDowell's original fiction is way funnier and more poignant than anything being generated by the girls above him. --Natalie Papailiou, author of blog MILF: Mother I'd Like to Friend