Readers who are in thrall to the genius of Severance will not want to miss the opportunity to get their own copies of The You You Are. Available for free on Apple Books, in both text and audiobook versions. The audiobook is read by Michael Chernus. If you are not au fait with the Severance world, this may mean nothing to you, but if you are grab it while you can.

Here’s an excerpt from Ricken’s opus:

I’m the youngest son of renowned performance artists Bob and Grace Hale, known collectively as HumpDumpster, though I have sought for decades to distinguish myself from their intellectual shadow. […]

Readers of my previous books know that both my conception and birth took place in a small theatre behind a defunct perfumery in Western Oregon, as part of a nine-month performance art piece originated by my parents titled “Smells Like Afterbirth, F**ker.” It was noteworthy in that I was the first child sired exclusively for theatrical purposes, and critics at the time hailed it as “a baroque deconstruction of the increasingly perverse human urge to procreate.” My birth was witnessed by such cultural leaders as Jason Robards, Lina Wertmüller, Walt Frazier, and Oregon Governor Robert W. Straub, who called it “American theater at its most sublimely obscene.”

Though I cannot remember my birth performance, the knowledge of it has always brought me great joy. Knowing that a version of me, even one I don’t recall, brought meaning and profundity to so auspicious a coterie of persons, infused into my young life a deep sense of purpose. Yet, as I aged, irrational questions began to creep in. Was the piece truly as revelatory as the critics claimed? Was it not simply a retread of the Reeperbahn shows of Hamburg? Did my parents actually want a child?

The latter question especially took root as HumpDumpster moved on to new pieces, including 1992’s critically lauded “Cheers, F**kers,” in which they held a Boston bar at actual gunpoint for 36 hours, leading to a quasi-substantive prison term. This and other endeavors led to long stretches where I was alone, and it was in these silent periods that a grim and intrusive resentment – of my parents, my lineage, and even myself – began to take hold.