Category: Non-Fiction

celebrity memoir, Memoirs, Non-Fiction

Book Review: I’ll Have What She’s Having by Chelsea Handler

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“The people who don’t get you are not your problem. Sitting around and thinking of all the people who don’t love you or don’t wanna hang out with you just diminishes your own light. Focus on where the light and love come from and park yourself in front of that. There are many moments in life when your own light is all you need.”

Through the most tender essays I’ve ever read from Chelsea, she shares what her dreams were as a child and how far she has come. She examines the woman fame let her become and wonders if that is the woman she wants to continue to be. She shares being at a low point in her life, the things that are important to her, her family, her work and skiing. She shares how her being child free is perceived and how much she actually loves children even though she does not ever want to have biological children.

“Learning the art of making an argument without yelling or screaming is something to behold. I’ve always dreamed of becoming the kind of person who can do that. Nothing feels like winning more than not losing your temper.”

I have read every Chelsea book. This is the first Chelsea book that I have listened to, and I loved the experience I had with it. I listened to this book during a road trip, and it caught me unawares. I think this is Chelsea’s most vulnerable book. She shares about being rejected by a governor, playing pickleball with the Bushes, sharing psychedelics with strangers in Spain, what her relationship with her family has become, and the love affair with Jo Koy.

“You are the love of your life.”

I think that Chelsea presents like such a strong woman which she absolutely is, but it was quite interesting to listen to her describe her relationships and all the things she endured. It was fascinating to hear her stay with a cheating partner and go back to him over and over again. When she describes her relationship with Jo and how much they tried to make it work and how she thought they would be married, I felt compassion for her. She also declines to mention why they broke up because she just feels that she has outgrown that period in her life where she would throw the men she has dated under the table for a story. I suspected that she broke up with him because he wanted a more traditional relationship on the conservative side – but that’s just my speculation from reading between the lines.

“It had taken me decades to learn how to not lay blame, to not be punitive or vindictive when someone hurts me. To be mindful and consistent while recognizing the difference between instinct and impulse. To recognize that instinct is a knowing feeling, and impulse is acting on an emotion.”

I gave this book 5 stars because I really enjoyed listening to Chelsea let us into her life. Please do this one on audio if you pick it up.

Leggy.

celebrity memoir, Memoirs, Non-Fiction

Book Review: From Here To The Great Unknown by Lisa Marie Presley & Riley Keough

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“I have a vague memory of this one conversation we had in that room about a passage that Elvis had underlined. I started to call someone to help me remember it, but realized that there’s no one left to call”

Whatever you felt after reading the quote above, is basically the feeling you’ll have about this book. For me, it was sadness and the feeling of loss and that’s what I got from Lisa Marie while reading her memoir. For those who don’t know, Lisa Marie, only child of Elvis Presley, decided to write her memoir but got stuck and enlisted her oldest daughter, actress Riley Keough to help her complete it. Not long after this, Lisa Marie passed away and Riley is left to complete what her mother started.

“Grief settles. It’s not something you overcome. It’s something that you live with. You adapt to it. Nothing about you is who you were. Nothing about how or what I used to think is important. The truth is that I don’t remember who I was.”

This was a very captivating memoir because it was everything a memoir should have, especially the most important – being honest. Lisa Marie was very open and honest about her life. She laid bare the good (which wasn’t very much), the bad and the ugly and you could feel her struggle and pain through her words. Even when she made decisions that seemed outrageous like deciding she wanted to be a mom and Danny Keough had to be the father and essentially trapping him, you just want to give her a pass because you just wanted to help ease her pain away. The honesty also rang even truer if you do the audio because you get to hear actual audio of Lisa Marie recounting her memories (which is what Riley used to finish up the book)

“He wasn’t an angry person, he didn’t live there. Some people full-on live in destruction. Others buy real estate and walk around in anger for a little while. My dad would just visit.”

Lisa’s first big loss was the loss of her father when she was 9 years old and I don’t think she ever recovered from it. She had a bond/connection with her dad that I can’t whole heartedly say was healthy. Not to say that they didn’t love each other, they did but her dad was an addict and as his addiction got worse and his moods became erratic it seemed like Lisa focused on just making sure she was on his good side. I say this to say that the book sounded like Lisa idolized him especially post-humously and it was almost like he could do no wrong. A stark contrast to her feelings towards her mom. She definitely wrote more about her dad than her mom.

“She mothers my daughter through me.”

As much as this was Lisa Marie’s memoir, the biggest impact it left on me was a desire to know more about her daughter, Riley. I mentioned earlier how it felt like Lisa Marie idolized her dad, I do think Riley did the same for her mom. She did a fantastic job of finishing the book for her mom and piecing together stories told to her by her mom. I felt that Lisa Marie didn’t stand a chance at happiness in life with everything that she went through and I wondered the same about Riley and how she was able to navigate the dysfunction and heartbreaks such as her brother’s suicide. She seems to be a parentified child and the person who kept the family together as the sensible one and it made me want to know more about her true feelings and how she navigated it all.

“I looked at my face as a child and thought, My God, if only anyone could have told you what you were going to go through in this life, what you were going to be up against. That cute little blond-haired child in the matching dress with her mommy. It overwhelmed me.”

Overall, I definitely recommend this book. It’s a quick 6 hour listen on audio. Julia Roberts narrates Lisa’s part and Riley narrates her part (I will admit I was not a fan of Riley’s voice). As mentioned earlier, we get to hear the actual raw tapes of Lisa Marie talking about her life and there is an honesty there that made me believe everything she said. She gave an aura of IDGAF and honestly, what was there to lose? I learned things I didn’t know about her previously like her romantic relationships, her music career and how fraught her relationship with her mom was. All this and more provided for one of my favorite memoir reads.

I’d like to give trigger warnings as there is mention of sexual assault, drug use and suicide.

Taynement

Black Authors, Memoirs, Non-Fiction, race

Book Review: How To Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair

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“A book, I soon learned, was time travel. Each page held irrefutable power.”

Born and raised in Montego Bay, Jamaica, Sinclair tells us of her upbringing in a very strict Rastafarian household. She tells us the story of being under the thumb of her dad who was basically a Rastafarian zealot and lived in fear 24/7 that his family would be corrupted by the Western world. So much so, that he kept them away from other people, made them grow dreadlocks, made them dress modestly from head to toe and banned them from so many other things we would consider normal. On the flip side is her mom, who was so smart but so passive and was complicit in her dad’s choice on how to raise the kids. Sinclair walks us through from the very beginning to the point where she began to rebel and begin to discover life for herself.

“The bond between them was as unspoken and unbreakable as the barrier between us.”

Wow guys, not since Sex Cult Nun have I read a memoir that was this mind blowing. And to no one’s surprise, what the two have in common is – religion. Sinclair was able to write an impactful memoir because she understood where she came from. Earlier, when I said the book started from the very beginning it’s because she gave us the background of her parents and we get to understand their individual traumas and understand their motivations to how they became who they were – not that it excused it but we had some kind of context.

“I was still young enough to keep approaching him, a kicked dog slinking back, doing as my mother did.”

The writing style in which Sinclair wrote this book was so good and there was a heavy air of foreshadowing that had you on the edge of your seat as her father became more and more volatile. It almost felt like it was a thriller until you remembered that it is a true life story. The juxtaposition of her father getting more volatile and her mother getting more withdrawn was fascinating especially when you consider that the thing that saved her and her siblings was how gifted they were academically, which you could say they got from their mother. She made sure her kids were well educated and used it to their advantage. Though her mother was complicit in some areas, she definitely scrapped for her children.

“How would I know where to begin? Here, in the same hills that had made my father, now sprung the seed of my own rebellion.”

As fanatical as the dad was, the one thing that confused me was that he did not stop them from going to school and in fact was proud of her accolades even if it came from the Westerners he seemed to despise so much. Since the mom was a tutor, she could easily have home schooled them but Sinclair going to school revealed her poetry gifts which led to her expanding her views on the world and realizing that perhaps there was more than what her father had told her. I will say though, despite all the awfulness, something out there was looking out for Sinclair and her family because things always seemed to work out just at the right time.

“The bond between them was as unspoken and unbreakable as the barrier between us.”

With the way, the book ended it seems Sinclair wanted to focus on just her upbringing and how she broke out of the mindset. It would have been nice to know where the relationship with her dad ended up in detail and I was particularly interested in knowing how this affected her romantic relationships. But overall, this is a memoir that will stick with you for a long time. Besides just telling her story, I learned a lot about Rastafarianism, something I knew nothing about before this. You can tell how much she loves her home land as she described various parts of Jamaica in detail and with love. I am always in awe how people remember so much detail about their lives because I know personally, I remember certain stories in detail but for the most part they are hazy. Though tough at times, I recommend this book.

Taynement

celebrity memoir, Memoirs, Non-Fiction

Book Review: You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

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“What would I have done to save my marriage? I would have abandoned myself, and I did, for a time. I would have done it for longer if he’d let me.”

Maggie Smith writes a poem that blows up and becomes the beginning of the end of her marriage. In her memoir, You Could Make This Place Beautiful, poet Maggie Smith details the disintegration of her marriage, the heartbreak that followed and her renewed commitment to herself and her children. This is a book about what happens to a marriage where your significant other becomes jealous of your success and expects you to shrink yourself and maintain the status quo of what your marriage was before your fame.

“I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.”

I remember reading an excerpt of this book as an essay in The Cut and loving it, which is why I picked it up. This book should have stayed an essay. I do not think Maggie Smith had enough material to make this an actual book. I was fascinated by the dynamic I saw expressed in that essay because it is a dynamic that I am very familiar with as a Nigerian woman. Smith’s lawyer husband constantly belittled her creative work, expecting her to perform a housewife role, even though she worked from home and when success finally found her, he resented her for it. I wanted to get an understanding of how despite being more educated than her mother, she had fallen into the exact same role as her mother even though she thought her, and her husband were a modern couple.

“Here’s the thing: Betrayal is neat. It absolves you from having to think about your own failures, the ways you didn’t show up for your partner, the harm you might have done.”

I never got this understanding because even though Maggie Smith chose to write this memoir, she is very reluctant to share her side of the story. She insists on telling us that there is no one truth, which is true, and also the very reason she should have never written a memoir if her truth hadn’t been solidified yet. If your feelings are still ever constantly changing, don’t write a memoir and then accuse your readers of having a voyeuristic gaze for daring to be curious about information that you are writing about.

She constantly would bring up a piece of information and then proceed to tell the readers that she would not tell us that information, why bring it up then Maggie? We did not ask you to write this book. You did! Why write the things you do not want to write about? Why keep bringing up specific scenes that the reader would have no idea about if you didn’t bring it up only to tell us that you won’t tell us what was said in the scene?

“I’m trying to tell you the truth, so let me be clear: I didn’t want this lemonade. My kids didn’t want this lemonade. This lemonade was not worth the lemons. And yet, the lemons were mine. I had to make something from them, so I did. I wrote. I’ll drink to that.”

One thing that is very clear in this book is that Smith is still angry. You can read it from the lines she has written and those she insists she will not write. I do not fault her for this, and she has every right to be angry. Her husband cheats on her, she finds out and proceeds to never confront him about it. He lets them go to couple therapy for months where he demands things from her that would mean the death of her career while never admitting that he cheated.

Infact Maggie spends therapy sessions continually twisting herself into pretzels to get this man to stay and never brings up the fact that she found out he was cheating on her. In the end, he makes the decision to end their marriage, get on dating apps and then move out of state, away from his children, to begin a new life with his affair partner. Who wouldn’t be angry?

“As if you have to break someone’s heart to make them strong. I could say you don’t get to take credit for someone’s growth if they grow as a result of what you put them through.”

Maggie Smith is a better poet than she is a prose writer. This book is so repetitive that I just wanted it to end. I love poetry so I enjoyed this more than the general public is ever going to. Smith spends the entire book circling around the thing while refusing to tell us about the thing. And she is so heavy handed every time she thinks she’s written a great line or said something profound that you can smell her smugness coming off the page. All in all, I gave this book 3 stars on Goodreads because I enjoyed the great lines in the book, but I actually wouldn’t recommend it.

Leggy

celebrity memoir, Non-Fiction

Book Review: The Woman In Me by Britney Spears

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“I wanted to hide, but I also wanted to be seen. Both things could be true.”

It’s crazy the things we experienced in real time that we kind of just shrugged or looked away from e.g when R. Kelly married Aaliyah when she was just 15. Britney’s ordeal is another thing that I can’t believe we lived through and just chucked it up to her being out of control until a few years ago when the ugly truth about her conservatorship came out and it was like “wow!”. When it was announced that she will be releasing her memoir, I knew I was going to be on it ASAP.

“The saddest part to me was that what I always wanted was a dad who would love me as I was—somebody who would say, “I just love you. You could do anything right now. I’d still love you with unconditional love.”

The biggest takeaway from this book is how much Britney’s family hated/hates her. Sounds like a strong choice of word but that is the best way to describe it. Britney starts the book by saying that “tragedy runs in her family”. Her grandfather passed down his traumas to her father which manifested in him being an alchoholic and not being kind to his family. She grew up in turmoil and music was her escape.

“I was quiet and small, but when I sang I came alive”

The book also conveys how much Britney enjoyed performing and how much it fed her soul. So when we get to the part when the conservatorship started and stripped her of this joy, it’s more palpable. We get to understand more of her mind state and how much grief and pain she was going through. And instead of creating a safety circle, her father and mother because if you say nothing, you are complicit, decide to exploit her and put her in a mental prison.

I did both the audio and read the book and it’s amazing how even though Michelle Williams voiced the audio, you can hear it in Britney’s voice. You have to look at the book as not a literary masterpiece, but as one long rebuttal from Britney to share her side of the story. She does a good job of letting us know all the events that led to the world thinking she was “crazy”. She makes mention many times of being like Benjamin Button and aging backwards mentally like a little girl, which makes more sense of why her Instagram is the way it is (plus regaining the freedom she lost).

It’s crazy that this lasted for 13 years. Britney doesn’t shy away from the details of all the unfortunate incidents in her life and my God, the paparazzi was relentless. Were there parts of the books that remained surface? yep. She doesn’t get into detail on getting with Kevin Federline while he had an 8 month pregnant girlfriend, just saying she didn’t know. But it happens again when she dated a paparazzo. I was interested to know more about her dating life while under the thumb of her father and in one case where her most recent husband, Sam Asghari was, when she went to the many unnecessary rehabs her dad whisked her to.

“If you stood up for me when I couldn’t stand up for myself: from the bottom of my heart, thank you.”

But she did all this for her babies because they kept dangling it as a threat. Also, once again we see how our legal system fails people. She wasn’t even against the conservatorship but just anyone but her father. It’s crazy how the “Free Britney” movement is what saved her and she specifically thanks her fans on this one. The book does not take into account her current divorce and she is full of praises for him in this book.

Overall, this was a quick easy read/listen that provides a different perspective. The book made me very, very sad because how can you be so wicked to your own flesh and blood. She’s just never had anyone in her corner and I wonder how she can proceed when she has clearly been looking for stability and love in her life and every single person keeps failing her. How do you trust anyone?

In one part, she mentions how everyone keeps saying that the conservatorship saved her life and she says physically, maybe but mentally, it crushed her soul. I hope she finds a way to move forward. If you’d like more Britney, the Britney vs. Spears documentary on Netflix puts faces to the names in the book.

Taynement

Christian nonfiction, Memoirs, Non-Fiction, Self Help

Book Review – How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told by Harrison Scott Key

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Key’s wife wakes up one day and tells him that she wants a divorce because she’s in love with their neighbor, Chad and has been having an affair with him for years. He is stunned because Chad’s wife and his wife have been friends for years and their children used to play together, and they have each other over all the time. This revelation kickstarts the insane years to come in their lives. It’s one thing after another and the waves just kept coming and knocking them down.

I was so torn reading this book. I think people take back cheating spouses all the time but when someone comes out and admits that their spouse cheated and they took him/her back, they’re met with a lot of shame and scorn. The number for infidelity in marriages is not looking good. I tried to verify the claim in this book that 1 out of every 4 couples experience infidelity in their relationship. I could not find an exact number that corroborates this exact claim but every number I could find was alarmingly high. So, somebody has to be lying. People are taking back cheating spouses all the time; they’re just not talking about it or they’re not in the public eye enough for it to matter.

Harrison decides to write about his marriage in a glaringly honest way. He is transparent about having the feelings so many of us think good and Christian people don’t. He talks about the break down and buildup of his marriage without being voyeuristic about it. Marriage is brutal and he wants to show you exactly how brutal it is to make a vow to be with someone for the rest of your life. Even his pastor reminded him that he can divorce her if he wants and assured him that it was sanctioned by the Bible, but he chose to fight for his marriage.

This is exactly what I’m torn about. I do not think these kinds of marriages should be fought for and I worry that a lot of people are going to read this book and decide to stick it out in terrible marriages because of this book. Also, they haven’t had years of distance from these events so who’s to say that this marriage is even going to actually go the distance. Are they going to come back in a couple of years and tell us they’re divorcing? I’m not convinced that they won’t. A lot of fighting for this marriage just seems like Harrison is doing all of it and the actual cheater is demanding a lot of things to decide to stay.

I also had to check my internalized misogynistic self and ask myself if this was a book written by a woman who took back a cheating man would I be more okay with that? There’s nothing in this book that I haven’t heard and seen men get away with in marriages and still stay married without me even blinking an eye. It’s almost like I expect men to act that way but when a woman has the audacity to step out of her marriage without being penalized for it, I suddenly feel uncomfortable reading it?

Harrison also talks about all his faults in the marriage. Honestly, I can’t imagine being married to him. He’s a humorist writer and has an amazing sense of humor but a lot of it was at the expense of his wife and a lot of it was mean. I don’t like mean humor especially in romantic situations. He rarely helped out around the house and basically let his wife do everything related to their children. I appreciate him being able to do the internal work and not stand there and say, “I am the perfect suffering husband married to this whore of a woman!”

Anyway, this is one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read all year. I gave it 5 stars on Goodreads. If you read it, I’d like to know your thoughts.

Leggy

celebrity memoir, Memoirs, Non-Fiction

Book Review: Love, Pamela by Pamela Anderson

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I actually don’t know what the temperature of Pamela Anderson’s popularity is at the moment but in the 90’s she was a household name. She had her persona – blonde, big boobs, very sexual and let’s be honest ditzy. But we never really know the full story so I was interested in watching her Netflix documentary when it came out. It was also announced that she had a memoir coming out and I knew that I would be interested in reading that as well. The doc came out first and after watching, I definitely saw her in a different light and she is much smarter than most of the world gave her credit for. I was also curious to see how different the book was going to be. From the documentary, I learned that she kept very detailed journals and I think this helps in some of the clear details that she has in her book.

Pamela walks us through her childhood in Canada. Her parents’ quite frankly – toxic relationship which I think played a part in her toxic relaionships when she got older. Pamela’s childhood is impactful in her story because she suffered a lot of sexual abuse before the age of 18. This abuse included one from her babysitter and in another incident a situation with 4 boys. I had to take a breather after reading that part because you just wonder how one gets over repeated sexual assault.

She tells us about her career and relationships and of course her most high profile one with Tommy Lee. His jealousy, her miscarriages and how bad the paparazzi was to her. Of course she touches on the sex tape and we get to hear things from her point of view. There was a TV show about Tommy and Pam and I never stopped to think how she would feel about it and how it affected her. It was great to see her devotion to her boys and them being the reason she couldn’t be with Tommy even if that is what she wanted.

While Pam is all about seeking answers in whatever form – she shares her friendship with a pastor and she reads a lot of self help, I still think there is a gap in her relationship with men. Even if it was not her experience, I think she should have still addressed the accusations against Hugh Hefner. Pam holds Playboy in high esteem and only spoke highly of them. The same goes for Rick Saloman and she is still a huge advocate of Julian Assange.

All in all, I thought she met most of the tenets of a memoir and was pretty open about her life. It was a quick listen (5hr+ audiobook) and I feel like I got to know the generous, kind hearted, intellectual side of her that I’d never learned about from the media. I do wonder if watching the documentary affected my opinion of the book since some things weren’t new to me but overall it’s a quick read if you are looking to get a memoir checked off in your TBR list.

Taynement

Book Related Topics, celebrity memoir, Chick-Lit, Fiction, literary fiction, Memoirs, Non-Fiction, romance

Our Best and Worst Books of 2022

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Leggy’s Best:

“My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.”

Emily St. John Mandel has become such a must read author for me. I have enjoyed every book of hers I’ve ever read. I absolutely adored this book and gave it 5 stars. You can read my full review of this book here. This year has been a fantastic reading year for me in all genres so I thought it would be hard for me to pick a favorite but this was such a clear answer for me.

Other favorites:

  • Book Lovers by Emily Henry (favorite romance book this year for sure! Full review on the blog here.)
  • Dreadgod by Will Wight (The 11th book in the Cradle series by Will Wight. Please read these series if you haven’t yet. These books are so much fun. The 12th and final book comes out next year. favorite fantasy book of the year for sure!)
  • Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield (This was my favorite weird book I read this year. Goodreads marks this as horror? Didn’t get that at all but it was so strange and such amazing writing)

Taynement’s Best:

This was one of the first books I read this year and nothing else captured my attention like it. This memoir of sorts has Faith Jones recounting her time in a cult and how she got out of it. I could not believe a lot of the things I read and the fact that it was someone’s real life was really jarring. As mentioned in my full review, loads of trigger warning for this one. Any book that had me go down a rabbit hole of wikipedia and documentaries just to get more information after I was done, was bound to be top of my list.

A lot of the books I enjoyed were niche favorites (books about reality show bts) but some other favorites were:

  • Verity by Colleen Hoover (This book was an acid trip but I probably read this the fastest. Full review here)
  • The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green (I guess I had my number of non fiction reads. Perfect blend of smart and interesting. Full review here)
  • The Good Sister by Sally Hepworth (This was a random read that I ended up liking a lot. Full review here)
  • Carrie Soto Is Back by Taylor Jenkins Reid (TJR rarely misses with me and this was not an exception)

Taynement’s Worst:

This was a recent review of mine so it should be no surprise that it is my worst. Up until writing this, I didn’t realize how much non-fiction I read this year. Well, my worst book is also in this genre. Every Tom, Dick and Harry has a memoir now whether they deserve it or not. This memoir had so many missing gaps, way too much toxic positivity and just overall missed the mark. Extra negative points for the terrible voice cadence that was used in the audio book. I just really hated this book y’all! (Full review here)

Leggy’s Worst:

Instagram loves this book. I have a mini rant about this book on our Instagram page (@nightstands2, follow us!). I picked up this book because of the hype and because I saw a trailer of the movie adaptation on Youtube and decided to just read the book instead, what a bad idea. There was nothing romantic about this book. The heroine is the exact type of character I hate in a romance – think Zooey Deschanel from New Girl, obviously hot girl who is “awkward” and has no idea she’s hot. I rolled my eyes so much reading this book it almost fell out of the sockets.

We hope you have enjoyed talking books with us this year. We’d love to know what your best and worsts were so let us know in the comments. Have an amazing Christmas and we’ll see you in the New Year. Happy reading everybody!

Leggy & Taynement

celebrity memoir, Memoirs, Non-Fiction

Book Review: You Should Sit Down For This by Tamera Mowry-Housley

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Tamera Mowry-Housley is best known as half of the identical twin duo that starred in “Sister, Sister” and as one of the talk show hosts on “The Real”. Because everyone gets to write a memoir these days, Mowry-Housley has written one at age 44. The book title says it’s about life, wine and cookies which I assume is supposed to be about her personal life, her career and I guess life advice as she sprinkles across the book, something she calls “Tamera-isms”.

I won’t mince any words and just flat out say that I thought this was a terrible book. In fact, it was an insult to the word memoir. I picked up this book because Mowry-Housley has the reputation of being the “boring” twin and is often misunderstood, I figured I’d pick this one up to hear from her point of view and see if I could gain a different perspective of her and unfortunately, this did not help her case at all. It was awful.

As always for a celebrity memoir, I did this on audio and I wanted to end my suffering as soon as I started. I am not sure who signed off on this because the tempo was not it at all. It was almost like she was putting on a forced positivity and the cheeriness came off as fake. It was just over the top. But it was just 5 hours long so I figured I could bear it. The book had soooo many metaphors and euphemisms that were over the top and was distracting from whatever surface story she was telling us.

When you read a memoir, you should feel like you learned things about them that you didn’t know before reading and this was not the case here. In fact, you would know more about Tamera looking up her old interviews and watching The Real than reading this book. For example, in a story talking about her breakup with her now-husband, Adam she says “I don’t want to talk about it, even just thinking about it now brings a tear to my eye”. No memoir should have the phrase “I don’t want to talk about it” that is a signal that you do not need to be writing a memoir.

As mentioned above, she is best known for “Sister, Sister”. I had settled in to listen to the behind the scenes of the show and couldn’t believe that it was a blink and you miss it situation. One minute she mentioned they booked the show and the next she is saying when the show ended. For someone who is partly famous because she is an identical twin, she barely if at all talks about their relationship. We don’t learn more about her family and that’s because most of the stories were surface. I didn’t understand the choice to not talk about being biracial instead she refers to herself as a black girls with curls. She never referenced the reality show she had with her twin sister, never referenced the depression she went through in college.

I can give a little credit to her getting a little more authentic when talking about being on The Real and how much anxiety it gave her but she over compensated by telling us every 5 seconds how much she loved her coworkers and she spent most of it defending her husband. The chapter where she talks about the death of her niece due to gun violence was the other story she was authentic about. She tries to be down with people by talking about sex and how people consider her a prude to which she boldly tells us that they are wrong and she is infact “a freak in the sheets” (cringe). She proceeds to share her sex goals which are places she wants to have sex that include a lavender field and on top of a car in the rain (gosh) and then follows it up with it’s none of our business which ones she has checked off. Sigh.

Overall, I just got the impression that Tamera is the kind of person who likes for everything to look nice. She mentions how she is proud of her positivity but it almost sounded like a detriment in this book. I think the idea of the book was a cross between Yvonne Orji’s “Bamboozled by Jesus” and Gabrielle Union’s “We’re going to need more wine” except she failed on both ends. Orji found a fun way to give fun, personalized advice while Tamera told us things that everyone already knows and wasn’t able to capture Union’s realness. In case you couldn’t tell, I do not recommend this book. I gave it 1 star and immediately told Leggy that it is in the running for my worst read of the year.

If you have read this and think otherwise, I’d really like to hear your thoughts. Let me know in the comments!

Taynement

celebrity memoir, Memoirs, movie related topics, Non-Fiction

Book Review: I’m Glad My Mom Died by Jeanette McCurdy

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“Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them? Especially moms, they’re the most romanticized of anyone. Moms are saints, angels by merely existing. No one could possibly understand what it’s like to be a mom. Men will never understand, women with no children will never understand. No one buts moms know the hardship of motherhood and we non-moms must heap nothing but praise upon mom because we lowly, pitiful, non-moms are mere peasants compared to the goddesses we call mothers.”

I know. What a title. If this is your first time hearing about this book then congratulations to you because the marketing team for Simon & Schuster definitely went all out on this one. There was no way I was skipping out on this book, especially after Leggy read it first and told me about it.

Jeanette McCurdy is a former child actor, best known for her role on iCarly. Her memoir mostly recounts her life getting into the business and navigating it while managing the emotions of a narcissistic, emotionally abusive mother. She shares how her mother controlled her life and emotions including her weight which eventually led to an eating disorder. She speaks about how her life was still controlled by her mother’s voice even after she passed away from cancer in 2013.

Like most people, I know McCurdy from her days on Nickelodeon but I didn’t know anything about her personal life till I read a People magazine article on her in 2021 that talked about her one woman play with the same name as her book. I remember being taken aback by the title but much like the quote excerpt above from her book, I remember thinking back then that if her mom did do horrible things to her, why do we in fact romanticize the dead?

McCurdy is very blunt and matter of fact about how she recounts her life story especially how she walked on egg shells around her mom and spent most of her life trying to keep her mom happy including fulfilling her mom’s dream of being an actor. She does mention her dad in the book but he doesn’t seem to have had an active role in her life. I wondered if she harbored any resentment towards him but that is something she did not go into detail about. The other thing I wondered about was that McCurdy recounts things so well, to a time period as far back as when she was 6 years old that it made me wonder how she was able to remember everything verbatim and when I say that I mean generall. It was impressive.

I have seen this book described as humorous but I have to be honest, I did not encounter any humorous moments. I was more wrapped up in how in so many words, she was her mom’s emotional support human and through the pages I felt claustrophobic for her. The second half of the book follows her life beyond her mom’s control and how she tried to live life and manage her eating disorder. I confess I did not find the latter half as interesting and instead found her Nickelodeon years more interesting especially her description of Ariana Grande, the resentment she had for her back then definitely came through the pages.

Overall, while I did not think it was an exceptional book, it was entertaining enough and I do think it was brave of her to push past the norm and recognize that she was not treated well by her mother. The book never addressed if her mom suffered from a mental illness but probably there was no chance to, given her cancer. As always, I did this on audio and McCurdy reads it herself but be warned that it does sound like she is rushing through, so don’t worry your audio speed is just fine 🙂

Taynement