It might not seem like that long ago to some of us, but the Internet of 2001 was an entirely different Internet from today’s. Social media was almost literally nonexistent. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, not even MySpace yet. There was no Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok. Forums existed, but there was no Reddit yet. YouTube was still four years out. Amazon was but a humble bookseller. Google had already pulled out to the front of the search engine pack, but was also still—at least nominally—trying to Not Be Evil.
Another major difference was that blogs had a lot more cachet in those days. I speak mainly of blogs that were on their own websites, though LiveJournal and Xanga added their own flavor to the online stew by bringing the concept to a less tech-savvy crowd, giving those who fancied themselves the stars of their own lives a spotlight to shine on themselves.1 But a blog that was on its own website was a different animal. You weren’t yet able to do what I did, which was find a website that would accommodate your modest hosting needs, pay a year upfront to gain access to the WordPress suite, find a layout you like, maybe tweak it a bit, and start pounding out the words. You either had to build the thing yourself from the ground up, or have someone who could do that do it for you.
And in the almost incomprehensibly different world of 2001, that’s exactly what Wil Wheaton did.
Into the digital breach, Wil Wheaton launched his own self-designed, self-coded blog. At the time, he was still pretty fresh off of getting chewed up and spit out by the child star industrial complex, put through the Hollywood wringer (along with various other emotional ones) by an unloving father and a mother who saw him as little more than a pawn to redeem the failure of her own acting career. He wanted to explore facets of himself besides acting, and he ran his website himself so he could commit to total honesty and avoid fluff. So he wrote. He wrote, and he wrote, and he wrote. And by 2004, he’d written enough to turn it all into a sort of memoir, entitled Just a Geek, in which he was able to elaborate further upon his previous writings and stake a claim to an identity of his choosing, not anyone else’s. He put that memoir out into the world, and time marched on.
As tends to happen to people in the fullness of time, Wheaton changed. Just as he had once traveled the far reaches of space on a TV show, he turned inward to explore the frontiers of the self. He sought and discovered new perspectives. He gained deeper insight into how his parents abused and mistreated him. He learned. He grew. Then, some time after that growth occurred, he went back and revisited Just a Geek.
What he found appalled him: page after page, entry after entry of cringey edgelord “humor”, of casual misogyny, homophobia, and ableism, and denial to his audience and to himself about how he was dealing with things. He faced a bitter truth: although it was no longer who he was, it was indisputably who he had once been.2 So, with the help of an editor who had previously enjoyed Just a Geek, Wil Wheaton went through it line by line, sentence by sentence, and held himself to account by penning a treasure trove of footnotes that excoriate his lazy downward punching, apologize profusely for his past words and deeds, and look back with the clarity of hindsight (and therapy) on the major turning points of his life and the motivations behind his old behavior. The new edition is fittingly called Still Just a Geek, and it contains the entirety of Just a Geek, plus several more blog entries from the years since, annotated and explicated in the same way.
It’s hard to understate the brutal difficulty of the task Wheaton has undertaken here. I suppose it’s fair to worry that this might sound like a somewhat self-indulgent endeavor, but amazingly, it never once comes off that way. To look back on your past self and understand that the things that version of you did and said are now unacceptable (and indeed, always were) is one thing, but to cop to them so publicly is quite another. That’s not to say that everything in Just a Geek has become outdated and wrong. In fact, I think it’s fair to say Wheaton was being completely honest in it. But it’s perhaps more accurate to say he was being as honest as he was capable of being at the time, both with himself and others.
Harder still is how directly he grapples with the parental abuse he suffered. Parents are a funny thing. Manifesting your negative feelings about them into vocalized reality is incredibly difficult. Even when they’re awful to you, they’re your parents, and a lot of people spend their entire lives twisting themselves into pretzels to forgive them for the horrors and brutality their parents visited upon them and make those things seem not so bad, or like part of a normal upbringing. But sometimes it’s impossible to look the other way anymore, and in 2018, that’s exactly the conclusion Wheaton came to. The cover of the original Just a Geek might have the words “unflinchingly honest” on it, but they are far more true of the updated edition. He repeats himself a lot, hammers on the “this is what my mother and father did to me” nail over and over and over, but it isn’t because he runs out of stuff to talk about. Much of what Wheaton speaks is the language of therapy, and what he repeats are things he has to remind himself about on a daily basis, because they’re things he spent the majority of his life either not believing, unaware of, or hiding from the true scope of—all because of how his parents ripped his childhood away from him starting from the tender age of seven. And if the magnitude of any of this somehow fails to come across for you in print, try listening to him talk out loud about it:
I don’t read a lot of memoirs,3 so maybe this sort of personal exploration carries more novelty for me than it might for someone else. I think it’s more than that, though. The fact is, you simply don’t hear a lot of men speak so openly in the fashion seen in this book. For me, the effect was incredibly refreshing. There is of course no singular root cause of all societal ills, but I personally believe a significant contributor to the damage America has suffered in the last two decades or so is people’s stubborn refusal to admit they were wrong about something, or really about anything. Too many people put too much skin in one flawed game or another right from the start, then dig their heels in deeper when it inevitably goes sideways, all the while never caring about the widespread damage they’ve left in their wrongheaded wake. So it’s nice to see someone leading by example and actually taking full responsibility for their actions and making solid strides in the oft-unpleasant but necessary work of becoming a better person.
Of course, not everyone will be so easily moved. Those who, unlike Wheaton (and, it should be noted, myself), aren’t white, cishet, and/or male might not be so inclined to give him a cookie for achieving what some might consider bare minimums of moral fortitude and allyship. I do think that’s a mostly fair criticism, but everyone’s journey has to start somewhere and sometime, and he does what I thought was a pretty good job of demonstrating that he’s fully aware of his privilege, mentioning in one reprinted speech that he knows he’s playing the game on the lowest difficulty setting with the celebrity cheat enabled. He doesn’t ever pretend that his life hasn’t been charmed in a lot of ways, and it’s obvious that his work is ongoing and this isn’t just a one-time reflection.
The book isn’t all down in the dumps. Wheaton has gotten much better at crafting a joke since his early blogging days, and there are lots of fun running ones in the footnotes, such as reminders to have an old-person thing checked out when he makes a reference to something ancient, and his adversarial relationship with his editor, which might not be as exaggerated for comic effect as I initially suspected it might have been. It also gives off a nice warm fuzzy feeling when he acknowledges a bit of writing from the distant past that manages to still hold up. Learning how to not be relentlessly self-critical and how to be appropriately positive about one’s own accomplishments are tough skills to cultivate, especially for someone who spent as long being devalued and gaslighted as Wheaton did.
It was also nice to find that I actually have quite a lot in common with him. We’ve both taken up the mantle of raising children that aren’t biologically ours, so that resonated with me a lot. We both have a spouse who is the most important person in our lives—and if it seems like he goes on and on about his wife Anne, all I can say to that is you don’t know unless you know. I’m lucky enough to have an Anne in my life, and there’s nothing on Earth that will improve your life that I can recommend more highly than finding your own Anne. There aren’t enough books on this planet to contain all the words for how important mine’s been to me as a rock, a confidant, and a catalyst for personal improvement.4 Also, we’ve both had to set hard boundaries with our parents, though unlike Wil, I ended up salvaging my relationship with mine and choosing merely to somewhat limit their access for my own mental health rather than excising them from my life entirely. But Wil did what he had to do, and once you get the full scope of it from this book, you can’t blame him one bit.5 And Simpsons quotes must be as practically a second language to him as they are to me, because I caught them all, even the ones he didn’t explicitly point out.
Most of the complaints I have about Still Just a Geek have to do with the formatting. I love a big pile of footnotes as much as the next person who’s read The Mezzanine or any David Foster Wallace essay, but because Wheaton’s are filled with frequent paragraph breaks, I would often fail to realize that one had continued onto the next page until I reached that page. It was also very difficult to see some of the symbols that indicated a footnote, to the point where I’d sometimes have to read the footnote first and then go back up to hunt for the asterisk that was linked to it. An index would also have been appreciated. But these are technical squabbles I had about a book where the emotional component is vastly more important, and so they’re honestly pretty negligible.
In The Shawshank Redemption, Morgan Freeman’s character Red narrates that Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) “crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.” Still Just a Geek is the story of how Wil Wheaton did the same thing.6 Many aren’t so lucky. But even though we live in a pretty brutal hell world, one of the things that will never stop being inspiring (at least for me) is when people emerge from the back end of a long struggle and at last gain the freedom to be their best self, whatever that looks like for them. Wil Wheaton had a lot of bad breaks over the course of his life, but he also had a lot of good ones, and a lot of his journey has been about learning how to recognize what those looked like and holding onto them for dear life. Hopefully Still Just a Geek can light a path for others to learn how do the same.
Adam Goss
I just read his book on audiobook in April. The account of what he and his sister went through with The Curse is horrifying. I am so glad he has indeed come through that metaphorical river of shit and is doing better. I’m so glad he found a pseudo-father figure in Jonathan Frakes. And I’m still looking for my Anne, I just hope its not too late to find her(I’m 49 and not getting any younger).
jess
I hear Frakes used to be cool.
Adam Goss
LMAO!
Matt N.
Thanks for the review of this. I read the original Just A Geek some time back and will definitely check out this one. I’m so glad that Wil is able to face his abusive past and is in such a better place now.
Jess D
This is one of the most convincing book reviews I’ve ever read. I love Wil Wheaton and his blog, but I might not have picked up this annotated memoir if I hadn’t stumbled upon your post. Thank you!