Who

Comic writer Ames is blessed with a total lack of inhibition when it comes to his work, which mines the embarrassing, the shocking, and the sexually transgressive to unique tragicomic effect. He admits to being "probably the gayest straight writer in America."

Backstory

Ames grew up in suburban New Jersey in a middle-class Jewish family (although he says with his fair hair and skin he was often mistaken for a non-Jew) and attended Princeton and Columbia, where he studied with Joyce Carol Oates before receiving an MFA in Creative Writing. His senior thesis became his first novel, I Pass Like Night (1989), which was blurbed by Philip Roth ("an authentic voice of youthful suffering"), but Ames' truly captured the public's attention in the late '90s when he started contributing to the New York Press. His columns and essays regaled readers with graphic details of his sexual exploits with transsexuals, his masturbatory habits, his preoccupation with his rapidly-thinning hair, and much more.

Of note

Readers nationwide can experience Ames' untrammeled oversharing—and obtain intimate knowledge of his STD history and experiments in colonic irrigation—thanks to several well-received compilations of journalism: What's Not To Love: The Adventures of a Mildly Perverted Young Writer (2000), My Less Than Secret Life (2002), and I Love You More than You Know (2006). He's also had another go at fiction writing, but his two novels, The Extra Man (1999) and Wake-up, Sir! (2004) didn't go down nearly as well as his true-life stories, which are reliably hilarious, as are his always packed readings.

On screen

Ames has appeared several times on The Late Show with David Letterman; he was an extra in the porn film C-Men and the lead in The Girl Under the Waves, an IFC movie that also featured Cindi Lauper's husband. The Showtime TV pilot of What's Not To Love, which Ames wrote and acted in, didn't get picked up.

Personal

Ames lives in Carroll Gardens. He has a college-age son, who sensibly chooses not to read his father's work (in which he's often featured; indeed, in What's Not to Love, Ames describes his conception). Ames is currently dating—much to the surprise and jealousy of other middle-aged, balding, Jewish guys—Fiona Apple.