An elongated, simplistic short story that has no real plot, zero chapters, caricatures instead of fleshed-out characterizations, and a whole lot of poAn elongated, simplistic short story that has no real plot, zero chapters, caricatures instead of fleshed-out characterizations, and a whole lot of poor writing that only covers 147 small pages. If you are into graphic gay sex scenes that involve enjoying ass smell then you might want to read it, otherwise stay away.
The lead guy in the novel starts in his teen years wanting butt sex (mostly rimming and topping), falls in love quickly with any asshole (literally and figuratively), cheats, does drugs, and soon has a bunch of broken exes. Along the way he is violently abused in and out of bed by one of the two main lovers with no remorse or consequences. There are also scenes with underage boys and escorts but no understanding of moral or legal consequences. And the big "ending" won't shock anyone.
The author is so insecure and uncreative that he basically takes the same mini-plot elements and repeats them five or six times throughout the booklet. Either that or he believes gay men have no ability to do anything other than go to a bar, pick up a random boy, and take him home to stay up all night screwing. The picture painted here of the homosexual community is not flattering and this would be a great book for those to use that want to prove how shallow and stupid gay men can be in pursuit of getting laid.
The whole thing is trashy and laughable. Comilla tries to make the narrator hip with his socialist politics and rants against capitalism. Not just a big yawn but ridiculous since the lead leaves Canada for New York City, loving the big city but complaining about people's financial success. There are many Canadian sections where untranslated French being spoken and the author is so out of touch with thinking about how the book will read that he doesn't care you don't know what's on its pages. Then inserted every once in a while are poems that the lead character supposedly makes money off of as a profession. You won't believe a moment of it or even care since none of the characters are concerned about anything other than the number of orgasms they have or drugs they get high on.
Nonstop negativity fills this book that reads like it was authored by a 13-year-old writing about crushes in a private diary. It does include a littleNonstop negativity fills this book that reads like it was authored by a 13-year-old writing about crushes in a private diary. It does include a little behind-the-scenes of Ellen/Elliot's movies and television work, but the bulk of the book is complaining about others. Along the way the writer slams anything traditionally moral and pushes lots of political propaganda, and there is surprisingly little about transitioning. If Ellen/Elliot wants to be a role model this isn't the kind of book to publish to do it.
Most disturbing is how Ellen/Elliot refuses to act in character when hired for work and demands clothing changes. It's something others in Hollywood wouldn't get away with in the early stages of a career. Instead, when those in charge try to force the actor to do something, Ellen/Elliot swears at them, stereotypes them, and demeans them. The writer is the most intolerant person in this memoir.
While no one should be bullied nor called names for their life choices, some of the stories and quotes in this book seem outlandish. I doubt recorders were going for all the off-hand comments supposedly made in school, by relatives, on set, and by those in the industry--yet there are many quotes attributed to people that are meant to make them look bad. Instead of a well-rounded story of this performer's life, what's written reflects negatively on the author more than society because of complaining on almost every page....more
Poor telling of a potentially fascinating life story that fails due to the author's method of stringing together dull details and not putting togetherPoor telling of a potentially fascinating life story that fails due to the author's method of stringing together dull details and not putting together a complete creative narrative. Wearing's first 72 pages about her normal childhood are snooze-worthy and when she finally gets to discovering her father is gay, the rest is told in such a distant and unemotional-yet-politically-propagandizing way that it ends up being a jumbled mess.
Wearing's poor writing style is evident from the opening "prelude," where she lets readers know that her dad's diary was getting a separate section and her mother basically refused cooperation with the book. That skews how important details are told.
The author also defends up front some offensive thoughts and wording in the book, including the fairy in the title, saying that she is totally against all stereotypes and caricatures. Yet the book is filled with them and she often laughs them off as well-meaning humor.
The book is a mixture of her personal childhood, her father's political teachings, her mother's distance in the face of shocking life changes, and the writer's own growing up to have her devastated feelings turn numb. Throughout the book she changes parts of the story--oddly giving three different distances from her hometown to Toronto or differing details of how certain events occurred when repeating them. It is a dull, frustrating read that could have been a fascinating inspirational story in the right hands.
The closest we get to truth in the book are the initial reactions from the author and her mother to the news that their father/husband was suddenly gay at the age of 40. Shock, hurt, revulsion, anger. But as time goes on both women end up silencing their feelings, twisting the story into something very different in order to cope with their repression. Wearing wants to sell us on the idea that she accepts "love is love," you shouldn't stop it, and that a man attracted to another man should feel free to abandon his marriage commitment and family in the name of love. Would she say that if her father ran off with a woman? Or with an underage male? Just curious where "love is love" actually stops being an acceptable excuse for making choices that damage others or is offensive to society?
Nowhere does she personally say what it really is: self-centeredness that hurts and destroys many others in the name of temporary pleasure and rejecting personal responsibility. The author's mother reveals it near the end of the book when she tells her daughter, "These days, you hear it everywhere: he's gay, she's gay. Every time I turn on the television it seems someone's gay, but in those days people didn't talk about that. I just thought he was selfish."
To which the author responds, "Selfish? What does that have to do with it?" Is she simply in denial, wanting to give the father the benefit of the doubt? Or has she integrated the politically correct liberal position of her late friend Pierre Trudeau by thinking the physical desires of a man with same-sex attraction are more important than his treatment of a longtime wife and three children?
Wearing also wrote, "There were plenty of times when I was angry about the whole thing--deeply sad, actually, though hiding it beneath a mask of cool teenage ire--but to wag my finger at Dad's willie and get all worked up about what he was choosing to do with it never crossed my mind."
Why in the world not? She never thought to be upset that the father who abandoned her was being led by the head of his penis instead of the head on his shoulders? That when he took off his supposed mask it caused her, their family, and some of his siblings and friends to have to start wearing their own masks to deal with his choices? And note that Alison Wearing does say her father was choosing, though nothing is mentioned about the dangers of those choices.
Why does society now give a pass to selfish horny gay, bi or other self-proclaimed genders that destroy families, abandon wives and children, and try to find happiness in all the wrong places? And why are most straight men treated like scum for doing the same thing? I'm just asking because she fails to deal with anything beyond the surface here.
Wearing also uses the book to defend the rights of gay men to pay for sex or have random hookups in bathhouses without consequence, and I wonder if that's the only way she can get over the deep hurt of a father leaving her at age 12. He wasn't going to change again so she had to--which resulted in her eating disorder, bad grades, and escaping to other countries.
We rarely hear her father's voice until, in an odd author's choice, she decides to print in a separate section his various journal entries along with a bunch of outside articles he collected in a box. It detracts from the narrative with a whole lot of nothingness and Wearing should have integrated some of his select writings along with her storyline.
In the end this feels more like a thrown-together political propaganda piece tailored to make her liberal friends and dad's gay buddies happy with her. She wants to please the daddy that left her. Yet Wearing is still that little hurt girl that is struggling with how to deal with life, wandering far away from home to find a way to accept her new reality that fairies don't always make dreams come true.
Paul Shaffer certainly loves music and old band members but too much of his book involves telling dull stories about them that many of us won't care aPaul Shaffer certainly loves music and old band members but too much of his book involves telling dull stories about them that many of us won't care about. He insists on giving specific names of the members of all sorts of groups he was involved in or details about minor studio sessions. He also pads talking about his Jewish heritage and his very short time as an actor. It's a bloated memoir that does contain some good anecdotes but you have to weed through all the dull stuff in order to find them.
His early years in Canada are somewhat interesting, especially with the many famous comedians he worked with during shows like Godspell. But he filters his young years through his Jewish background and is too glib when joking about those that weren't born into his faith. At one point he brags that Paul Newman was "the handsomest Jew since the beginning of time," but fails to point out that only Newman's father was Jewish and in Orthodoxy being born to a Gentile mother doesn't exactly make you a prime example of being a tribe member.
Shaffer seems unclear of the differences between faith, race, and country of origin. For example, his dad asks if the Moody Blues is a black group and Paul responds, "No, Dad, they're English." Last time I looked you could be black AND English, just as you can be black and Jewish or Jewish and English.
Then let's talk about what's missing from the book: sex and drugs. He mentions a few of his friends with drug problems yet he is up all night with some of the biggest drug abusers in modern history and says nothing about his own indulgence. Paul also states his attraction to women but it's distant and lacks details.
The big question that he fails to answer is about his own sexuality. His affectations often come across as flamboyant and fey, and he was pals with a number of gay guys including Barry Manilow, leading one to wonder about his interests in men. Ironically, Shaffer works with the gay man who wrote disco hit Last Dance. The two combined to write It's Raining Men and were going to premiere it at Gay Pride Day in Central Park but Paul's wife talked him out of it for fear of bad publicity. Hmmmm. He really needed to address the obvious question.
The book sounds canned in spots with outside details brought in that sound like the co-author overwriting and trying to make things entertaining on paper. There is a lot of repetitiveness. When we hear for the fifth time Paul's love of Jerry Lewis we have to roll our eyes, because the famous comedian treats Shaffer poorly. In general, Shaffer seems to think way too positively about some famously mean guys in show business, overpraising Lewis, Chevy Chase, David Letterman, Lorne Michaels, and the notorious Phil Spector. It's unclear if Paul is just too wimpy to say anything negative about them, but the musician has no problem tossing in a few zingers of others that he had trouble working with, including his wife.
Certainly the book is worth reading if you are interested in SNL or Letterman, but you have to wade through a whole bunch of Shaffer's bland musical vamping to get to the rare good melodies....more
Shallow, uninspiring book of a somewhat complicated actress/model who writes more like a child. Her poetry is sewn throughout the book and while some Shallow, uninspiring book of a somewhat complicated actress/model who writes more like a child. Her poetry is sewn throughout the book and while some might like it, I found it distracting in order to cover up some real truths that Anderson chooses to skip over.
She does give a fairly good short summary of her childhood, with her hippy parents and her own teen rebellious streak. She flutters through a few stories, doesn't give many specifics, and never seems to be ashamed of doing some very bad things. She is sexually abused when very young and blames some of her lackadaisical attitude on that.
Before you know it she has moved to Vancouver, is discovered on a crowd cam at a football game, and seemingly within months is on the cover of Playboy (we're unsure of the timeline because there are almost no dates in this book). But where are the photos? None are included, and if any memoir should have them it should be this.
If you're looking for any inside details on her career or love life you won't find much here. It almost seems like she went through her Wikipedia page and just then jotted down a sentence or two about the significant events. Playboy mansion? Check. Dating Scott Baio? A sentence. Other serious boyfriends? Often just alluded to or not mentioned by name. Baywatch? Almost nothing but she didn't want to do the series. Home Improvement? Well we know Tim Allen isn't happy about his one-sentence mention but that's about all she says regarding the series that started her on the road to fame but she had no intention of being on a sitcom! While she was an extra on Married With Children, as she walked to her car, the Home Improvement casting director mistook her for auditioning for the regular sitcom role she was given.
And this is Pamela Anderson's life--people throwing themselves at her and job offers falling into her lap without even trying or supposedly know what's going on. Despite her claims of thinking she isn't attractive, obviously her looks made everyone give her things she didn't earn or deserve, resulting in an expectation that she didn't really need to try or make any personal choices.
What are better detailed in her book are her relationships with the main men in her life. Jon Peters (creepy oddball producer). Tommy Lee (drugged and crazy), and Kid Rock (who thought she was a whore). Those stories are somewhat interesting but pretty short and written without much emotion other than mostly positive memories even in negative circumstances.
While Anderson claims she's highly intelligent (and that her abusive chimney sweep dad was Mensa-level brilliant? Seriously?) she comes across as a lightweight and at times an airhead that drifts from uplifting cause to depressingly bad choices. At one point with Lee she attempts suicide and kind of makes it sound like more of an embarrassment than an understanding that it was a sign she needed help and rehab.
Then she claims she has "silly photographic memory," but if that's true why isn't this book filled with specific details and better stories? Hilariously, just three sentences after she wrote that, she said, "The Baywatch years were a blur." Huh? What is it, does she have a great memory or not? Maybe all the drugs and men have caused things to blur together.
She ends a chapter on Tommy Lee bragging about an amazing birthday party she planned, saying, "Love is the quality of attention we pay to things." Well based on that, she doesn't really send her love to readers or fans in this book the way the title would imply. There is very little attention paid to detail and too much of trippy-hippy creativity, including a final page self-portrait that Rorschach would analyze as the author being a total mess....more
Oversharing? Try underwhelming. This allegedly funny Canadian slogs through dull blabbering and boring complaining with only one really great story woOversharing? Try underwhelming. This allegedly funny Canadian slogs through dull blabbering and boring complaining with only one really great story worth reading in the book (about his hosting a Grease singalong). Otherwise there's little that's interesting or humorous about this whiny gay guy trying to proclaim his self-empowerment while unhappy with just about everything and everyone.
This is a whole bunch of nothing, and not in the hilarious Seinfeld way. Who cares about Hitchins having to pull hairs growing in odd spots? Or that the drag queens he performed with would steal other people's frozen dinners from their shared fridge? This is what Hitchins thinks is good material. Then there is the sitcom-like confluence of hard-to-believe circumstances that make the book sound like fiction. He obviously exaggerates to try to enhance humor, but when he does the reader loses trust in whether any of it can be believed.
The sure signs of a memoir writer with not enough material are the inclusion of at least one of two things: a dull childbirth story or a chapter on animals. This book sadly has both, a sure indication that much of this is space-filler. Hitchins never really provides any substance, does everything he can to make his parents look horrible, does his catty put-downs of truly successful entertainers, and by the end I couldn't figure out why anyone would consider him talented. He's just an insecure bitchy gay man mistaken as a woman and happens to be a ginger, giving him a gimmick on which to base his non-stop negativity. He should feel humiliated....more
What is unsatisfying? The answer is: this bland book that barely covers the outline of Trebek's life and career. There is very little personal insightWhat is unsatisfying? The answer is: this bland book that barely covers the outline of Trebek's life and career. There is very little personal insight in it and almost nothing about his cancer diagnosis. He admits near the end of the book that his wife claims he's not a good communicator--and it's certainly true here. Not only is the book poorly written but he has a giant wall of protection up, not allowing the reader to really see inside his world. It's the opposite of what I'd expect from someone who is reflecting on his life as he nears the end.
The organization of the book is part of the problem. Many chapters are only a page or two, and each starts with a question (like Jeopardy's "answers"). There are over 60 chapters that are choppy and uncoordinated. Instead of a cohesive narrative filled with detail about his life and experiences, these are short remembrances and in the middle of some he admits he may not even be recalling things correctly.
I could write a long list of things he doesn't get into. They would include anything about his second wife or kids beyond how great they are, virtually nothing about his first wife, a two-sentence mention about his divorce and how well they all get along afterward (no reason given for the divorce), few details about any of the many other TV shows he did beyond Jeopardy, and only a few pages about his cancer.
On the other hand, he talks a bit about his parents (for whom he seems to hold a bit of a grudge), talks about his philanthropy, shares a lot of photos, devotes way too much space to contestants on Jeopardy, and while some of the behind-the-scenes information on the show is good I've read it all before in other books about the series. He also briefly makes some political and religious comments that are somewhat offensive because he doesn't explain himself, just makes quick sweeping conclusions about some very serious topics. So he doesn't reveal much that's personal here and he seems to be avoiding the deep reflections that he should be having on paper late in life.
I admire Alex Trebek for what he has gone through and how strong he is to continue to work through his chemo treatments. He seems to have a very healthy ego and a drive to live for his family. Of course he has the fame and fortune that gives him advantages over other cancer victims, though he tries to claim he's just an average guy. His heart is in the right place, but he failed to use this book to truly help others by revealing intimate details that are needed in order to allow readers to relate. Trebek seems to like the safety of scripted answers that writers provide on a quiz show but is hesitant to reveal his own inner feelings when his own life is in jeopardy....more
Cait Flanders thinks her life is so important that she started a blog about it and now has written a book about it. The problem is there's nothing remCait Flanders thinks her life is so important that she started a blog about it and now has written a book about it. The problem is there's nothing remotely interesting about this self-centered woman or the life she lived.
She did find herself getting hooked on drinking (in a bizarre story involving the only time she met her birth father at age 12, who took her to a bar) but did a wonderful job finally kicking the habit and going alcohol-free. Congratulations. That's about the only interesting thing in the book and only takes up a few pages.
Otherwise she focuses on every little minute detail about herself--her weight, her debt, her clothing, her job, her trips, her apartments (five in one year?), her friends, etc. Get the point? It's all about her. And who really cares?
If this were a famous celebrity maybe it would be somewhat interesting to hear that she dumped all her possessions in the middle of a room and sorted them out, giving 43% of them away--but from a complete stranger there must be much more to the stories make a book worth reading. These are just the facts, plain and simple, with no true narrative worth reading.
Add to it that she's from Canada and most of the stories involve locations most of us know nothing about and you have a book that isn't worth reading.
The writing style is simplistic. Her logic defies common sense. She is proud of cutting her spending in half during the year she stopped shopping for extras (note that she didn't actually "stop shopping" as the subtitle claims), but she gloats about spending a huge amount of her income on travel. It makes no sense since she claims to have cut out all but the essentials, and her travel to various locations were typically nothing but for pleasure.
There will be someone who might value this book--a fellow Millennial that has no ability to have self-control and needs an online blogger to share her story in order to have motivation to do it. It speaks poorly about today's young adult generation that this kind of paint-by-numbers how-to-live-life book is supposedly an artistic masterpiece, when in truth it comes across more like something she'd draw in pre-school....more
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