Justin Halpern Books in Order

If you want the breakout dad stories: Sh*t My Dad Says → More Sh*t My Dad Says
If you want awkward relationship memoir: I Suck at Girls → More Sh*t My Dad Says
If you want the full nonfiction run: Sh*t My Dad Says → I Suck at Girls → More Sh*t My Dad Says
If you want his fiction debut: Get Lost

Justin Halpern grew up in San Diego, in the Point Loma neighborhood, in a family that clearly knew how to talk. His father, Sam, was a doctor, but at home he was better known for blunt advice, sharp timing, and absolutely no interest in making a point gently. That voice, half insult and half life lesson, would later become the engine of Halpern's best-known work.

At San Diego State, Halpern pitched for the Aztecs before deciding baseball was not the story he wanted to stay in. He quit the team to focus on film and television, then headed toward Los Angeles and the long, messy early years of trying to make a writing career work. It was not glamorous, and that turned out to be useful.

For a while he did the classic writer grind, waiting tables for years, writing during the day, and taking whatever comedy work he could find. He was involved in online comedy, helped edit the site HolyTaco, and later wrote for Maxim. None of that came with instant security, but it gave him the kind of education young writers actually use, deadlines, rejection, and time to figure out what his own voice sounded like.

Then everything sped up.

In 2009, after a breakup, he moved back into his parents' house in San Diego. Living at home again meant hearing his father's running commentary up close, so Halpern started posting the lines online. What began as a way to save funny quotes, and maybe use them later, blew up fast.

That burst became Sh*t My Dad Says, the book that made his name. It became a New York Times bestseller, and later a CBS sitcom starring William Shatner. Readers came for the wild one-liners, but they stayed for something more familiar, a son trying to grow up while being roasted by the person who knew him best. Halpern understood that the joke worked better when the affection was real, so the book landed as both comic rant collection and family story.

He followed it with I Suck at Girls, a memoir about crushes, bad decisions, embarrassment, and the long road from kidhood awkwardness to adult commitment. Later came More Sh*t My Dad Says, which stayed in the same family orbit and kept pulling humor out of relationships, work, and the general chaos of becoming an adult. I Suck at Girls also became the basis for the TV comedy Surviving Jack. What people tend to like in these books is the mix of crude jokes and real feeling. Halpern rarely hides the bruises underneath the punch lines.

Baseball never fully left.

A lot of Halpern's work lives in Southern California kitchens, ball fields, old neighborhoods, bad dates, and family conversations that go off the rails. His narrators and characters are usually smart enough to know they are messing up and human enough to do it anyway. Outside books, he built a long television career with Patrick Schumacker, working on shows including Harley Quinn and later helping lead Abbott Elementary as an executive producer and co-showrunner. In 2026 he published Get Lost, his first novel, a comic mystery that keeps his taste for messy family dynamics but shifts it into fiction. These days he looks less like a one-book internet phenomenon and more like what he was trying to become all along, a working writer who found a voice, stayed funny, and kept building with it.