How to Win a Million Dollars and Shit Glitter Book Review: A Luminous Tribute to Not Quite Getting What You Want

Rating: ★★★★★

How to Win a Million Dollars and Shit Glitter Book Review:

By now you know the drill. I wrote this book. I am biased. So let me hand the mic to Publishers Weekly BookLife and Kirkus Reviews, two of the most respected names in publishing, and let them tell you what they think.

How to Win a Million Dollars and Shit Glitter is a memoir. It starts with me as a kid in 1980s Dubuque, Iowa, trying to scam national contests run by McDonald's and Cap'n Crunch. It follows me through cleaning toilets backstage at the original off-Broadway production of Urinetown, bumming around Paris, surfing in Hawaii, losing someone I loved, building a fashion app, and launching a novelty venture called Glitter Poo Pills — capsules filled with edible glitter that add sparkle to bowel movements. Yes, they sold. The book is about what happens when you refuse to live the safe, button-down life everyone expects of you and instead spend decades hustling, reinventing, and occasionally failing spectacularly.

Publishers Weekly BookLife Prize gave it a 9.50 out of 10 overall, with a perfect 10 in both Prose and Character/Execution. Their assessment said I write "with sparkling, tongue-in-cheek prose that feels like a fireside chat with a close friend." They called the combination of memoir with "a perceptive judgment of America's often-empty vision of success" powerful, and said I "successfully charter readers through his upbringing and adult years, using them as both learning opportunities and valuable lessons to never give up on over-the-top dreams." They also said the narrative "bursts with splashes of surprising insight" and challenges readers "to live authentically, without fear of failure." Read it now on Amazon.

Their full review opened with a line from the book: "We were all sold a sugar-coated lie — work hard, play by the rules, and success will fall into your lap." They called it a "picaresque memoir" and compared me to Redmond Barry, the antihero of Thackeray's Barry Lyndon. The review warned that I promise criminal escapades and tawdry tales but deliver something better: "more useful examples of scraping by on one's wits." And then they landed on a line that I think captures the whole book better than I ever could: "He dared live an unlikely life in a society that punishes those who try it."

Their takeaway: "Picaresque memoir that's less tawdry than promised, for the best."

Kirkus Reviews called it "an exuberant life story written with humor, panache, and heart." They described it as "a classic tale of a small-town lad with starry-eyed ambitions making it in the big city, but with a more realistic take on the circuitous path that journey takes — and a clear-eyed conclusion that the destination matters less than the adventures along the way." They highlighted the writing about my father coming home from the John Deere plant: "I can vividly recall him trudging up the gravel alleyway behind our house at the end of each shift, his slim but strong frame covered in silt from the factory floor." They also quoted a passage about losing someone to pneumonia: "The hospital room felt too still, the machines were quiet, and the coldness of the room pressed down on me like a suffocating blanket. He was gone."

But Kirkus also caught the humor. They quoted me pretending to meditate at a Laotian temple: "I wondered if Buddha was silently judging me from behind that peaceful smile — did he know I was thinking more about my posture and my Apple Watch than any kind of inner peace?" They called the prose "raffish" and "full of self-deprecating humor regarding the distance between exalted pretensions and awkward reality."

Their final line: "a luminous tribute to the inestimable value of not quite getting what you want."

One more thing. When Publishers Weekly BookLife reviewed The Third Person, they referred to this book as "the charming How to Win a Million Dollars." That is an unsolicited endorsement from one of the most respected review outlets in publishing, dropped casually into a review of a completely different book. I am not above pointing that out.

Here is what I take from both reviews. Publishers Weekly sees a hustler who dared to live differently. Kirkus sees a dreamer who learned that the journey was the point. Neither of them is wrong. The book is about chasing a million dollars and ending up with something worth more than money. It just took me forty years and a bottle of glitter pills to figure that out.

If You Liked How to Win a Million Dollars, Try:

• Adult Drama by Natalie Beach — A memoir about ghostwriting for a famous influencer and the strange cost of building someone else's dream. Same picaresque energy, same uncomfortable honesty about ambition.

• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah — Growing up in apartheid South Africa with humor, heartbreak, and impossible odds. Same ability to make you laugh while telling you something devastating.

• Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs — A wildly unconventional upbringing told with dark humor and zero self-pity. Same refusal to play it safe, same feeling that you cannot believe this actually happened.

From Luke Stoffel's Bookshelf

How to Win a Million Dollars and Shit Glitter is part of the Seven Dimensions series, the story continues in The Warboy Chronicles: The Third Person. It is a memoir told as Sci-fi: thewarboychronicles.com

The Third Person by Luke Stoffel: Book 1 The Warboy Chronicles