Somewhere between a four-page broadsheet handed out on the streets of Boston and a media empire that now employs hundreds of people, Dave Portnoy decided he had a story worth telling himself, before anyone else could tell it for him. That impulse is the engine of “Cancel Me If You Can,” a memoir that reads less like a business retrospective and more like a guy grabbing you by the collar at a bar to explain, in exhaustive and often profane detail, why he refuses to apologize for who he is.
The premise is simple enough: Portnoy traces Barstool Sports from its scrappy, borderline-broke origins in 2003 through multiple brushes with corporate collapse, advertiser boycotts, and public controversies that would have sunk a more image-conscious founder. He doesn’t shy away from the messier chapters. Instead, he uses them as load-bearing walls for his larger argument, that authenticity, however abrasive, beats managed perfection in a media landscape that increasingly rewards people willing to say the thing everyone else is thinking but won’t post.
What makes the book work, even for readers who have never set foot in a Barstool comment section, is Portnoy’s willingness to let the reader see the anxiety underneath the bravado. There are real stretches here about sleepless nights, near-bankruptcy, and the specific loneliness of being a public punching bag, that complicate the tough-guy packaging. The strongest material comes when he’s describing the mechanics of building something from nothing: pitching advertisers who wanted nothing to do with him, learning to read an audience in real time, and figuring out, well before most legacy media companies did, that distribution mattered more than polish. Fans of business memoirs in the mold of “Shoe Dog” will recognize the shape of the story even if the voice is considerably rowdier.
Critical response has been split largely along predictable lines. Reviewers sympathetic to Portnoy’s brand of unfiltered commentary have praised the book’s candor and its unusually clear-eyed account of how digital media actually makes money, arguing that it’s more substantive than the “cancel culture” framing in the title might suggest. Detractors have pushed back on the parts of the book where accountability seems to arrive dressed as swagger, and where controversies that hurt other people get relitigated mostly on Portnoy’s own terms. Even reviewers who found the persona exhausting have largely agreed that the entrepreneurial sections are genuinely instructive, and that the book is more self-aware than its marketing lets on.
The verdict: “Cancel Me If You Can” isn’t going to convert anyone who’s already made up their mind about Dave Portnoy, and it doesn’t seem especially interested in trying. What it does offer is a candid, occasionally uncomfortable, consistently readable account of what it actually costs to build a media company on instinct and stubbornness rather than a playbook. Whether you come away rooting for him or rolling your eyes, you’ll finish the book understanding exactly how he got here, and that clarity is worth the price of admission.
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