Cancel Me If You Can drops June 30th, just in time for the beach chair and the cooler, and Portnoy has been pumping the preorder all week. The pitch is exactly what you'd expect: a trip down memory lane for Stoolies, plus the untold stories, including how he actually clawed the company back. He's also leaning on the Time Magazine nod naming Barstool one of the 250 most iconic companies in American history, which is the kind of stat he was never going to let sit unused.
Portnoy walks through the preorder pitch and the case for why even non-Stoolies should care.
But here's the part that's actually funny. The book exists. The book is written. The book is in the can. The audiobook? That's where things have gone sideways. Portnoy is narrating it himself, which sounds like a no-brainer until you remember that reading a 300-page manuscript out loud, cleanly, take after take, is a completely different skill from ranting into an iPhone for 4 minutes about pizza.
Portnoy admits the audiobook grind has been brutal.
I am narrating it which has been one of the hardest worst things I’ve ever agreed to do cause I can’t read that great. 1 hour a day every day for last 3 weeks.
An hour a day, every day, for 3 weeks. He says he can't read that great. Which, honestly, tracks. The guy built a media empire on improvisation and gut, not on diction drills. There's a reason most authors hire professional narrators, and there's a reason the ones who insist on doing it themselves usually regret it about 45 minutes in. Portnoy is just the rare one willing to say out loud that he hates every second of it.
The official preorder push leans on the Time Magazine ranking and the Lifeline Animal Project donation hook.
There's something very on-brand about all of this. The whole thesis of the book is that Barstool defied the odds and refused to die, and now the guy who wrote it is white-knuckling his way through narrating his own war story one painful hour at a time. If you preorder, just know that every "uh" and reset in the final audio file was earned.