What is the author's tone in the memoir, We Need to Hang Out?

The book’s overall narrative integrates a range of tonal qualities, many of which ebb and flow throughout the book. Most of these are connected to different aspects of the author’s identity. Sometimes his language and stylistic choices suggest that he wants readers to see him as an objective journalist, presenting his ideas with a degree of scientific and/or research-based credibility. In such sections, the writing is somewhat intellectual in tone, brushing up against the distant, emotionally cooler qualities associated with both journalistic and academic writing. Frequently, though, he juxtaposes language that has these tonal qualities with pointed humor, suggesting that while it is important to pay attention to the included research, it is probably not a good idea to take that research too seriously.

This latter quality, which might be described as deprecating or perhaps ironic, is connected to another of the book’s main tonal elements. That quality is associated with, and defined by, the author’s frequent use of curse words, his frequent references to fears that any sort of vulnerable male-male connection would be perceived as “gaaay” (64, et al), and his frequent references to the peak of male-male intimacy being expressed as “ball busting” (64 et al). There is not necessarily an official, dictionary-based term for this kind of language, but to use some of the author’s own descriptors, it comes as the language of “bro’s,” of “frat boys,” of “jocks,” or of “dudes.” In other words this tonal quality, which is arguably the book’s primary one, can be defined as representing the voice of middle-class, white, heterosexual men with what clearly seems to be a lack of emotional intelligence and / or articulateness.