I read Sara Barron’s previous memoir, People are Unappealing, and don’t remember much about it but when I saw this is my “recommended reads” on Amazon I figured I would give her a try. In The Harm in Asking Sara Barron focuses on “everyday life,” pulling from her childhood up to present day with varied results. The first section of the book isn’t great, there are a lot of bowel movement references… Once Sara begins fixating on whether or not she could be come a […]
Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Too
This review will be woefully inept as I finished this book over a month ago. I remember really liking it but I was surprised I gave it four stars rather than five. This is Tina Fey’s autobiography and the audiobook is narrated by Tina. If I read this book without any context I could still identify it as her work. Maybe that is because I loved 30 Rock but in any event this book is thoroughly Tina. In the book she discusses more of […]
An Education by Lynn Barber
“What did I get from Simon? An education – the thing my parents always wanted me to have.” Simon was an older man who seduced Lynn Barber when she was sixteen, introduced her to a lot of very unsavory characters and scenes, and ultimately screwed her over mightily. She tells that story, along with details about her childhood, in the opening chapter of her memoir: An Education. It was fascinating — what Simon told her and showed her about a world she’d never encountered; how wholly […]
Notes from the Underwire
Quinn Cummings was nominated for an Oscar for her role in The Goodbye Girl and then floated around Hollywood in a few other roles before she and Hollywood took a permanent break from one another. “I cannot say that being a child actor was detrimental to me, but I could have done without being a former child actor. To be a child is a temporary condition. To be a former child actor is a permanent state.” She touches base on when she was acting and […]
There Are No Monsters Here
“From 2000 to 2004, five Black young men I grew up with died, all violently, in seemingly unrelated deaths. The first was my brother, Joshua…” Jesmyn Ward’s Men We Reaped is beautiful and heartbreaking in a way that only stories about family and home can be. This book made me weep in the prologue. I want to be clear: this was no mere tearing up. Sobs were heard. Ward’s words don’t require a book-long, slow build-up to a crescendo of emotion and tragedy. The tragedy […]
Maya Angelou memoir on political awakening
This is the fourth of seven memoirs written by Maya Angelou, and it covers the period from 1957 and 1962, shortly before her departure from California with her young son Guy in tow. Maya ends up in New York City, where she enters the society of black musicians, actors, artists, writers, political activists, and discovers new depths within herself as she joins the Harlem Writers Guild along such luminaries as James Baldwin, writes for and performs on stage, becomes northern coordinator for Martin Luther King’s […]
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