Category Archives: Biography

Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns)

by Anna

By Mindy Kaling

Having finished The Checklist Manifesto on my beach vacation (taking a lot of grief from my friends for bringing such antithetic beach reading), I picked up Mindy Kaling’s memoire, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, at my friends’ house while waiting for my airplane back home, and it really would have been a much more suitable book for the beach. I really enjoy Mindy Kaling as Kelly Kapoor in “The Office,” and I’m a little embarrassed that while I realize logically that as a successful writer, director and producer, she must be much smarter and more insightful than Kelly, she does such a good job of inhabiting that character that I keep sort of forgetting that she’s not Kelly. At least I’m not alone at this, because Kaling includes a whole list of ways she is similar and ways she is dissimilar to Kelly as a service to her readers. In all of our defense, she does actually have quite a few similarities, including the tone of the book.

My friends had warned me that it isn’t quite on the level of Tina Fey’s Bossypants, and it isn’t, but I think I enjoyed it just as much, quite frankly. Bossypants is a much more traditional memoire, while Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? is more of a collection of comedic bits strung in chronological order of her life. I perhaps would have liked a little bit more about her actual life stories, like her childhood in what sounds like a very well-to-do and predominantly white neighborhood in Massachusetts, the lasting friendships she made in college, and her breakthrough in New York and then LA. But, I wouldn’t have wanted to sacrifice the stand-up-comedy tone of the book, either. I do also love “listicles,” which are getting a bit of a backlash on the Internet nowadays, and there are several chapters that are structured as lists.

So, basically, this would have been a great book to read on the beach but was also a good book to read during the Olympics’ endless volleyball games, being then easy to put down for the gymnastics or diving.

Graphic design addendum: I think this book just has the prettiest cover ever. Like, lots of covers are elegant, striking, distinguished, mysterious, or garish, but I can’t think of another one that is just so straight-up pretty.

—Anna

Refining My Theory of Memoirs

by Kinsey

I’ve mentioned before that I much prefer memoirs that center around one concept or event, and then use that frame the story of the author’s life. Recently I’ve read two books that support my theory and one exception that might prove the rule.

I Never Promised You a Goodie Bag by Jennifer Gilbert is the story of how Gilbert, as a recent college grad, survived a brutal attack and then recovered and built a thriving party planning business (hence the title) and family. Gilbert has an inspiring story, and I could have read an entire book about her narrowly-avoided party-planning disasters, but the book reads very much like a one-thing-after-another narrative account of her life. I’m sure that to her it felt like it was all part of one story, since it’s her life, but I’m not sure it hung together as a narrative for the reader. Also, I only figured out by Googling her later that she was one of the real housewives of New York, something she never mentioned in the book at all. (Apparently, she was phased off the show because she wasn’t dramatic enough, which probably speaks well of her.) So, you know, it was fine.

Then I read Wild, by Cheryl Strayed, about a young woman who decided to deal with grief over the death of her mother and a divorce by hiking the Pacific Coast Trail. Strayed talks about her childhood and marriage and about all sorts of things, but her story is all centered around her hike, which gives the story a solid structure that supports her tangents and digressions. I really liked Wild, but it was not necessarily a happy, feel-good story. Strayed was seriously grieving and seriously unprepared for the trail, and there are parts that were so harrowing I had to essentially read through squinted eyes. But Strayed so clearly described how empowered she felt by the hike that I felt kind of empowered myself. (She also describes her blisters and black toenails in such detail that my feet started hurting.)

Finally, A Girl Walks Into a Bar by Rachel Dratch didn’t have any single, centering event, but I found it so charming that I didn’t mind.  The book is nominally about how Dratch stumbled into a relationship and baby in her early forties, when she had all but decided she would not have a family. In reality, big swatches of the book are about her start in comedy, and Saturday Night Live, and dating in New York, and the story just sort of ambles along. But Dratch is funny and sharp and sounds like she would just be an awesome person to hang out with, and the book is fun and quick. So I think the exception to my memoir rule is that if you are a professional comedian, then you can write a less-structured memoir. Otherwise, I suggest everyone read Wild and then write your own memoir around a very specific event.

Too Hot to Read

by Kinsey

I’ve been struggling to write an entry the past couple of weeks. It’s been so hot and miserable that I’m hardly motivated to do anything more than slowly sip a cold beverage while staring into the middle distance–even reading seems like a lot of work–and nothing I’ve read lately has been inspiring. I want to tell you about books that I love, but recently every book I come across is one I am basically okay with, they’re all fine, whatever. But other people seem to like all of these books, so let’s do a quick round-up:

Rules of Civility by Amor Towles–This has gotten rave reviews and it seems like something I should love–bright young things in New York City in the 1930s! And I did love the descriptions of what it was like to work as a secretary and eat at the Automat. But the main male character (who I guess I was suppose to be pining over?) was a total blank to me and the best friend seemed like a terrible friend that the main character was better off without. Plus, I felt like we were eternally on the edge of a more interesting story that we never quite got to–the book kept making allusions to the fact that the main character was Russian but had Anglicized her name to get ahead in the world, but we never learned anything about her family or why she did that or what the costs were. I wanted more. If you know the perfect glittering 30s book, let me know.

The Pirate King by Laurie King–This is the latest in the Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes mystery series (short version: after Holmes retires to the country, he teams up with a young girl and they end up solving mysteries together). I ADORE the first three, but the later ones have seemed lightweight, like generic mysteries that could be solved by any generic characters. The first few books were so enjoyable because Holmes and Russell and their relationship was so clearly drawn, and I feel like that’s been lost a bit. Only for diehards.

Shape of Desire–Remember when I was talking about how much I love Sharon Shinn? I do still love her, but please don’t read this one. I think this is her attempt to get on the Twilight bandwagon, not with vampires, but by setting a supernatural romance-type story in this world. I am on board with supernatural romance, but this one felt like a twenty-page short story blown out into a whole book. Go reread the angel books instead.

Slow Love by Dominique Browning–A memoir about a woman who gets laid of from her job and finds herself seemed like it would be right up my alley. It’s subtitle is “How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas & Found Happiness,” and doesn’t that sound fun? Eh. Way too much of the book was taken up by her whining about a relationship that ANYONE could have told her was pointless, and as far as I could tell, her happiness consisted of her using her enormous severance to retire to the vacation house she already owned. Less inspiring than I had hoped.

Here’s hoping that my upcoming beach vacation results in a whole stack of books I love and can heartily recommend.

Blood, Bones & Butter

by Kinsey

I like memoirs and I read a lot of them. Some of them work better than others. Blood, Bones & Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef by Gabrielle Hamilton is not going to go to the very top of my list, but it a solid book and an enjoyable read. Plus, trying to figure out why I didn’t like it more than I did helped me figure out exactly why I like some memoirs better than others, which could certainly help my future book selections.

Hamilton is the very respected chef at Prune, a very respected restaurant in New York’s East Village. (I’ve never been there, but the menu sure looks good.) There are about a million and one chef’s memoirs out there, but this one at least offers a change from the standard culinary school story, since Hamilton took a much more circuitous route to restaurant ownership. She roughly divides her story into three parts that echo the title. The Blood section deals with her childhood and her family, who sound fun but wildly dysfunctional. Personally, I don’t like reading about people’s childhoods and found the first section of this book a real slog–I honestly wasn’t sure I was even going to keep reading. But Hamilton leaves homes as a teenager and moves to New York City, and things pick up from there. In Bones, she describes how she wandered through work in large-scale catering houses and through an MFA program before opening her restaurant and I found all of that fascinating. (Her stories about the catering world also explain a lot of things about the meals I ate a conference recently.) Finally, Butter deals with her marriage, kids and, in-laws. Sound pretty standard? Well, she’s a lesbian who marries an Italian man so he can get his green card (sort of?), has kids, and then falls in love with his mother and the annual trip to Italy to visit her husband’s family. So, not so standard. There were a lot of things in Butter that felt very glossed over to me–she talks in depth about the affair she had with the Italian before they married, but hardly mentions even in passing how they choose to have multiple children–but Italy sure does sound nice. I might have married the guy for those in-laws myself.

So what insight about memoirs did this book lead me to? That memoirs work better when they are structured around something very specific. My favorite two memoirs of recent years were Eat, Pray, Love and Julie & Julia. I think those work well because they both use a particular activity or time period as a framework for the story, such as Julie Powell spending a year cooking her way through one of Julia Child’s cookbooks. This prevents the memoir from falling into a patten in which the author just basically describes everything that has happened from the time they were born up until the present. In Julie & Julia, no matter what tangents she goes off on or what she chooses to discuss, I know that the book is going to come back to what she’s cooking and that it’s going to end when the year is up. In Blood, Bones & Butter, Hamilton does use the three title ingredients to create a structure, but it’s limited–I actually didn’t figure out how the sections were divided until after I had finished the book. And the real weakness of the everything-up-until-now method of writing a memoir is that things often just sort of stop when the author reaches the current day.  I definitely felt that way with this book and would really like to hear the rest of Hamilton’s story. I am aware that when someone is writing the story of their life, that story may not have a classic narrative arc. That’s why I think the very explicit structure of something like Eat, Pray, Love works so well. As a reader, I want for there to be a conclusion of some sort, and putting a frame of time or concept around the story helps provide that. Blood, Bones & Butter is an interesting and well-written book–maybe it is to its credit that my main issue with it is that I wanted to hear more of the story.

Stories I Only Tell My Friends

by Christine

by Rob Lowe

Book Cover: Stories I Only Tell My FriendsI’ve got Rob Lowe’s back.

Before I read his autobiography, Stories I Only Tell My Friends, I had already felt like I grew up with him through his classic roles like Sodapop Curtis in The Outsiders and Billy Hicks in St. Elmo’s Fire. Later, he surfaced as Young Number 2 in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, seemingly coming back from nowhere (though the book proved me wrong on that). Then he established a place in my heart as Sam Seaborn, the deputy White House communications director in The West Wing.

So when his book came out, I was intrigued, particularly by the title. I bought it in hardcover as a birthday present for myself because I was too impatient to wait for a copy to be returned to the library. It turns out that the title is right on target. The more you read, the more you feel like you’re part of his inner circle. His stories are often deeply personal while they bring you behind the scenes in everything from his movies to his family life to his love life to his struggle with alcohol and time in rehab to his political adventures.

While he had a powerful drive for success and was continually looking for the next big thing. I gladly found Rob to be humble and well intentioned, even through his greatest moments of insecurity and turmoil. Through the unraveling of his life story, he’s sort of carried through his late teenage years into adulthood by a wave he couldn’t control. His hunger to act grew with each major role he played. With it came a lot more than anyone in their late teens and even 20s would be ready for. Visit his profile on IMDB (Internet Movie Database) and you’ll see a reference to him telling USA Today that he went gray at age 24.

What becomes an ongoing element of the book is his insight into other actors, many of whom also got their start in their teenage years, through Rob’s friendships and interactions. From living down the street from the Sheen and Penn families to having lunch with Sara Jessica Parker to running around with the “Brat Pack” to getting reacquainted with Patrick Swayze in Young Blood (years after playing his younger brother in The Outsiders), he continually shares his perspective into Hollywood personalities. It could come off as a bit much (really, you’re going to tout your relationships with everyone?), but his humble voice holds it together.  As he gets older and enters into a more of a soul-searching time, his perceptions grow deeper. Through his depiction of his friendship with Mike Myers you see Rob in a different light—one that shows off his humor, intelligence and lightheartedness—and ultimately encourages him to write the book.

What I enjoyed most about his book is that it actually comes from Rob’s voice. It’s written in a style that feels so conversational that it’s like being in a room with him while he’s telling the story. The genuine tone lets you in as a trusted friend and confidante.

Autobiography is a new genre for me, and I had no idea what to expect. Ideally, I think the story should feel like it’s coming from the true persona of the author and make you like that person more or as much as you already did, or at least see that person in a light that derives respect for his/her journey. (It’s got to be a vulnerable experience to put yourself out there like that.) For me, Stories I Only Tell My Friends did all of the above. Each time I watch Rob act as Chris Traeger in his most current role on the TV show Parks and Recreation, I am glad I got to know him better and feel like I am still growing up with him.

—Christine, contributing author