Speed-Reading Book Nerd Reviews

Spare

By Prince Harry.

I have spent this week doing a DEEP DIVE into Spare. I grew up royal-watching and I ended up recapping the book in great damn detail elsewhere, so here's my overall thoughts on it. I'm aware Prince Harry (not a school nerd) probably dictated it to a ghostwriter, but that seems to have worked out well. It's a collection of chronological anecdotes ranging from the day before his mom died and everything went to tell to an added on epilogue after the Queen's death.

The incentive for the book is Harry trying to explain to them around the time of Grandpa's funeral why he left, because they Just. Don't. Get. It. So he's explaining it to the world, even though he probably knows darned well the menfolk won't read it but will lap up every news story about it. 

What have I learned from the Harry experience?

(a) Pa and Willy (Charles and Wills) are the main family characters in this, with Granny popping up here and there and a few others getting a brief mention. Pa seems mostly well meaning but remote and not really having much of a clue as to how to bond with anyone who isn't Camilla. I always assumed Wills and Harry had a pretty good relationship, but Harry reveals it's more off-and-on and squabbling behind the scenes, with Willy wanting to pretend they don't know each other at Eton (oh, for fuck's sake, everyone knows you're related), getting into brawls, etc. Both brothers had OTHER PEOPLE as their best men and then the Palace claimed they were each other's best man, which was not the case. They're not all that close even before Meghan came along.

Once Meghan comes along, Pa is at first warm and then super distant, but Willy turns into Total Rage Monster, Jeebus H. Motherfucking Christ He's Awful. It should tell you something that Meghan wasn't even surprised/shocked to hear that Willy shoved Harry into a dog bowl. What the hell worse did she even know of before that? I read some article recently where Harry said he had double the manuscript and he could have said even more about Pa and Willy but it would be REALLY bad and you're like JEEBUS CHRIST. 

Harry tactfully doesn't say a whole lot about anyone else. Camilla sounds like they have a barely there cordial relationship before this, but he says nothing much other than Camilla is trying to boost her reputation by selling him out. Kate and Harry get along great at first, but Kate is less happy once people start comparing her to Meghan.  Granny pops in and out and is sometimes trying to be helpful and friendly, and sometimes it's a giant "who the hell knows what is going on here with her thinking" moment.  We'll never know why she was fine with Harry marrying Meghan, and she's vaguely kind of helpful even if her suggestion to write a letter to Thomas Markle goes horribly wrong. Unfortunately, any time the Queen delegates her employees to help H&M, the employees so obviously hate them both and will do anything to not do anything. Yiiiikes, these assholes. 

(b) The main thing to note about the British royal family is that they are constantly in competition with each other (check the paragraph about court circulars reporting on how many engagements they do a year and people trying to boost their totals at the last minute) and they are constantly throwing other members of the family under the bus by giving reporters/the royal rota shitty stories to blab about other people so that they look good. This is happening long before Harry meets Meghan and his own dad tries to defend him maybe once...which doesn't work. Soon Pa just sells him down the river because it looks better for a single dad to have a drug-addicted son. Pa/Camilla/their press people seem to do it all the time in particular. 

However, all of the relationships go to hell once Harry gets together with Meghan. People are polite at first--ish.... well, Charles is, anyway. Willy and Kate are Very Formal and get Very Offended at Meghan for various things as time goes on, things Meghan obviously did not wish to offend about, and it sounds like within a few years they were at "bitch eating crackers" with her, particularly Willy. A tsunami of hate starts happening to Meghan for the pettiest of shit, no wonder she gets suicidal. 

(c) Harry is not as rich as you'd think. Not that I know from rich people money, but Harry admits his father held the purse strings for everyone until he was cut off, and he never did things like carry money or order stuff online (you'd think he'd want to given the paragraphs on how he would run in and out of stores as fast as he could). He shopped at the English version of TJ Maxx unless his father bought him formal wear. He didn't super care about clothes and sounds like he lived a very bachelor nomad lifestyle and was given the shittier living arrangements a lot at the various palaces, cottages, etc. My bet is that his money went towards pubs and trips to Botswana. So when he's cut off and finds out that paying for security to keep him alive is going to be six million dollars, that's gonna be hard for him and what he's got for that is Diana's inheritance...followed by various corporate deals. He mentions that their offices were run down and short staffed and Meghan would go out and buy things like lamps and heaters and food for people. And yet, Charles claims he's too poor to pay for Harry and his wife in addition to another son and wife, which smacks of pure bullshit if you read about the money he's got access to. 

(d) Harry keeps track of ALL THE SLANDEROUS SHIT said about him and Meghan and pretty much everyone. He may use cute little aliases for the real assholes, but you can probably figure out who most of them are by design. Harry is convinced that if the Palace would say something/do something, the harassment might end, or at any rate he is going to fight back, make statements, and sue people because this shit has to stop before Meghan dies. I admire that Harry is trying, but frankly, it doesn't seem to work, because literally nothing works for anyone ever. 

Everyone else in the family has realized that there's nothing you can do about anything other than to ignore it or go with it, and that's what they say when Harry asks for help. This hurts Harry, which I do  totally agree that he should feel that way. This family absolutely DOES NOT BACK EACH OTHER UP IN ANY WAY, SHAPE OR FORM, except occasionally saying something nice privately. Not only do they not back each other up, they  actively aid and abet the enemy to make themselves look better. The royals are shitty, shitty people and while Harry's careful about talking about Granny, the true stories he tells about Pa and Willy really say things about them where name calling would not. 

Harry would REALLY love to be backed up and supported instead of being thrown under the bus, or having his wife thrown under the  bus. But that isn't gonna happen with these people. At this point Harry (and Meghan) have decided to blab what is probably a whole lot of everything, and let it all be out in the open.

(e) Including comments about Harry's frostbitten todger, having the occasional peeing incident, and other gross bodily comments once in awhile. As Lewis Grizzard said once upon a time, I don't think I'd a'tole that myself, but I get that Harry is a bit of a bro-y guy, he lets it all hang out, and he's no longer giving a shit about hiding that he got frostbite at the North Pole and needs to get a doctor to check it out. He's literally letting it all hang out, get your jokes in, Colbert, etc.  He's making a point of revealing probably almost everything except for whatever other horrible behavioral examples of Pa and Willy and possibly Granny.

He's very blunt and honest about his public fuckups and apologizes for his stupidity (was I thinking? I wasn't). He does mention that for the Nazi costume incident, they were all trying to dress ridiculously and Willy and Kate thought the Nazi outfit was the most ridiculous option so they voted for that one. I'm not sure if that's pushing the blame onto them, but it explains the thought process. Ditto naked in Vegas and other shit he brought upon himself.  Some people say he's trying to blame others, but he seems to take accountability to me. 

(f) The poor guy could not keep a relationship going until Meghan because every girl he dated wanted to break up over being stalked by the tabloids. (I note that one he barely dated later killed herself, because of all the harassment, according to Harry. I don't know anything about the girl and someone later told me she was getting media harassment for other reasons, but geeeeeeez.) Literally you are all, how did Wills get Kate (I note that Harry seems to think it's a good pairing) in the first place when the spare literally can't keep a girlfriend or even get started with one at times. You get why he is highly motivated to not have the same shit happen to Meghan, except it does and even worse because she's biracial. 

(g) The media have fairly well wrecked Harry's life and definitely ruined his military career by announcing his whereabouts in the field three fucking times. Literally on the last one, he spent two years learning to become a helicopter pilot so he could go back, and he STILL gets outed and his career ended. 

(h) Oh yeah, and his mom died when he was 12. As you can imagine, that wasn't good. This is not the family that is able to cope with emotional loss and a lack of warmth. 

I've seen a lot of griping online that Harry is whinging, but geez, I THINK HE'S GOT A REASONABLE LIST OF GRIEVANCES HERE, don't you? Can't go about without three bodyguards at all times or else he'll probably be murdered, the Taliban wants him, his own family is constantly selling him out in the press, he constantly gets harassed in the press and his wife gets worse, he can't go get a regular job after soldering and has been infantilized with regards to real life stuff, and when he objects to what's going on, gets thrown out on his ear with no money and no security and he very well could have gotten killed. Why the hell should he keep the family secrets after all of this? Harry says he's doing the same thing his relatives do, just under his own name instead of "Palace sources." Fuck these people. 

I give him whopping props for letting it all hang out and letting his story be known--his mom would be proud. I doubt it'll make anything better, but at least some people in the world will get it and be on their side and look askance at the royal family's shenanigans. And being honest about your truth does kinda set you free. 

For the record: I think all hopes of "reconciliation" with his family are dead, but I think they were dead once they announced that they wanted to go part time. You do NOT leave the royal family--look at how Edward got treated. Sure, it's bad that he was Nazi-friendly, but it's not like that made relations all that much worse when that came out. They already banned Wallis from England and his being allowed into England at all was at the Queen's pleasure. If Harry and Meghan hadn't done Oprah or the documentary or this book, they'd still be hated for leaving.  This makes it worse, but the original wound is the unforgiveable. I say fuck it, say your truth. 

Five stars. Good job, sir. You and your ghostwriter may have written the blowaway book of 2023 already. 

At Ease: Stories I Tell My Friends

By Dwight D. Eisenhower.

 

I figured I'd finish off my reading of Eisenhower by reading some of his own writing. This title sounded like something light and fun, but really it's just an autobiography of his childhood, his military career, and his career in academia. It ends right as he decides to run for president.

 

This is pretty straightforward...by which I mean, kinda dull. He gives off square 1950 vibes for sure and while I'm sure he's factual, he's not very lively about any of it. I was mildly bored and dredged through this for months, basically. It's not badly written, but a solid three star review here of "not gonna remember this once I'm done" either.

 

"I had reread Grant's memoirs, which I had always admired because of their simplicity and lack of pretension." This sounds about the same here, except I think Eisenhower possibly put more interesting bits in other books he wrote. I try to bookmark interesting bits while reading to mention in a review, but this one, well, I didn't have that many bookmarks and some of them, when I pulled them, made me think, "What the heck did I think might have been interesting here?"

 

Notable:

 

"The most dramatic difference between high schools of today and those of my time is probably not in the curriculum but in the life expectancy of the students. Then, except for the common cold and chillblains, any illness might easily be fatal." He notes that he nearly lost a limb from skinning a knee.

 

I did read his version of the "Mamie drives to visit him" story from a previous book. "She wanted the whole road to herself and I must say she needed it."

 

Dwight (a heavy chainsmoker, apparently) went to England and wasn't allowed to smoke until after the toast to the King had been drunk. Oops-ness ensued, and he apologized and then said, "Last night was the end of my attendance at formal dinners in London" over it. A few days later he refused to go to a formal dinner, and then the inviter (one infamous Louis Mountbatten) said not to worry about the smoking thing and come. Mountbatten did a quickie toast and then said, "General, smoke all you want." 

 

I like how it's mentioned that George Allen got a commemorative tablet put up at his home, saying:

"N.O.N. Historical Society. At this spot on February 29, 1776 Absolutely Nothing Happened."

 

Dwight was so addicted to editing and changing things on documents that he had to have them triple spaced and wide margins for extra room and he frequently couldn't read his own notes.

 

When going to work at Columbia University, he tried to get into his office on a weekend and the campus policeman wouldn't let him in. "When I added that my name was Eisenhower, his countenance and firm stand against my entrance changed not an iota. Nor did it when I assured him that I was President of the University."  Finally another policeman came along and vouched for him. He had a similar experience later on while trying to go look around the fine arts department. 

 

I like that Dwight mentions that he paints, but he considered his paintings "daubs" rather than paintings, and clearly he didn't like how most of his portraits came out because he destroyed more of them than he kept. 

 

"At one point I attended a dinner where there were three previous speakers. Each had gone on at considerable length and as the evening threatened to become morning, I decided to set aside my own text. When the time came to speak, I stood up, said that every speech, written or otherwise, had to have punctuation, "Tonight, I am the punctuation--the period," and sat down. It was one of my most popular addresses."  

 

Three stars. Okay but not memorable.

How To Be A Victorian: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide to Victorian Life

By Ruth Goodman.

For anyone wondering where I've been, or why the hell I still haven't written up "Be the Serpent" yet, I'm currently in an extremely involving production of "A Christmas Carol: The Musical," in which the ensemble is in almost every scene or is changing clothes and in every rehearsal and any spare time I've had has been going to my Halloween costume. After we launch this weekend, hopefully I have more time to do well, anything else.

 

However, during breaks, I've been reading this book, recommended to me by a castmate who was already reading it. I didn't know anything about Ruth Goodman's bona fides or what she does as a day job exactly before reading it,, but it sounded like re-creating and re-enacting historical practices is Her Thing. Sure 'nuff, Amazon bills her as a historian who's done TV shows on re-enacting period life on the BBC.

 

The book is exactly what it says on the tin, with each chapter covering say, waking up in the morning, meals, work, recreation time, all the way to nookie in the back of the book. It's totally a research book and not something with plot beyond that, but I did enjoy the author's personal asides about things at times warming up the narration, such as talking about switching from Tudor to Victorian corsets being something she physically adjusted to moving-wise pretty well, but she broke out into horrible rashes and started having issues with her voice. I also enjoyed the snarking about how crinolines are fun, but make you Very Drafty Down Below. She notes that wearing modern-day costumes made with modern-day techniques just aren't the same, going into great detail about how each outfit changes how you are able to move.

"I have made and worn a variety of Victorian women's clothes; suffered through numerous corsets and sworn at several sowing machines; hand-sewn whole outfits in styles up to the mid-1850's; and persevered with hand-turned and treadle-driven (powered by the worker's feet) machines while making later clothes from the period. I have learned the techniques for 'fanning' a corset, for handling horsehair, and I have spent hours drawing threads for handkerchief edgings. It has been enjoyable, time consuming and extremely interesting. There is no single resource that can make you better understand and appreciate the written accounts of the time. And if the making has taught me a great deal, so has the wearing." 

There's also a section on "stay bands," i.e. more or less corsets for toddlers, and how the author's 2-year-old wanted her own. She loved it! 

 

I did crack up at a photo of an extremely hot pink outfit, with the caption, "The newly invented chemical dyes exploded on the fashion scene after 1856. For the next fifteen years, it was not possible to be too brightly dressed."

 

And frankly, some things are goddamned horrifying and now you know why Victorians died so damn easily during this time period. Like I walked up to my castmate after reading the drugs chapter and she was all, "I KNOW!!!!"  "Morphine, opium, cocaine, laudanum, heroin, chloroform, ether, aspirin and cannabis were all purchasable, without any form of medical supervision, and all for a very few pence, at any pharmacist's shop by the end of the century." OH GOOD GOD I CAN'T EVEN WITH THIS. 

 

There's an entire chapter on "A Trip to the Privy," which I read during a lunch break at the theater, during which the custodian came in and was told about ah, a particular disaster in the men's room. Very fitting :P I also read about "The Great Stink of 1858," which I will not elaborate on further. Also, of course, women are always the ones cleaning the chamber pots, while "most men were blissfully able to walk away from this dirtiest of tasks." I note that those weren't intended for #2 and more for middle of the night pees. Make darn sure you always put it in the same place, everyone has their own pot, and put the lid on! 

 

The author points out that "hunger is at the root of" the historical Victorian experience, as most people were quite short due to malnutrition, especially the poorer people. The author mentions that her appetite and food preferences temporarily changed while living a Victorian lifestyle. "Foods that I would simply dismiss in my twenty-first-century lifestyle became delicious." Mediterranean foods became "thin and unsubstantial" and she developed an appetite for pig's trotters and jellied pig's heads. "My body was telling me in no uncertain terms that it needed plenty of carbohydrates and animal fats to sustain the Victorian lifestyle." She lost interest in strong flavorings as well. However, her actual weight never changed even with all that hard work. 

 

As for the sex chapter...attitudes varied between "It's healthy for a man to have a wife and a bunch of prostitutes" vs. "He should be curbing his lust!" I was particularly flabbergasted by the reusable condom made out of sheep's guts that was delicately tied on, then washed out and allowed to dry before re-use. I was amused that the author "attempted to make such condoms," but it sounds like she wasn't able to exactly replicate all the precise details. 

Anyway: I think this is a comprehensive review of the topic, and the author tries to make it lively where she can and create plotlines (of sorts) when following people in history here and there. So, four stars. However, this NYT review frankly does an even better job of covering this book than I do.

"One of the great pleasures of “How to Be a Victorian”? There’s a shudder on almost every page."

 

From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy

By Scott Meslow.

Exactly what it says on the tin: this book starts from When Harry Met Sally in the late 80's (gee, guess why I got this book), covering the heyday, to the days of streaming, to the petering out and possible return of the romantic comedy. There's brief essays on certain actors and actresses--on being America's sweetheart, on being a hard-working cad, on being the other guy, on being the best friend, on people who may not have always been romantic comedy people, etc. He focuses on success, influence, and if they reveal something unique. 

I'm always really happy to read, oh, any book that mentions When Harry Met Sally, so this part pleased me, of course. Other movies I love that it covers: Pretty Woman, Four Weddings, My Best Friend's Wedding, Bridget Jones, My Big Fat Greek Wedding,.... I liked the discussion of "Waiting To Exhale" and how love shouldn't be this hard. (Damn right.) I have not been into every movie the book covers (I don't care about the sperm hair gel movie, honestly), but others may be into that, and more power to them. Even I couldn't help but be amused at stuff like, "So began a months-long battle over a strand of semen." And I thought the discussion of why Will Smith has only done one rom-com due to institutional racism made good points.

I really felt for Nia Vardalos being told that "You're not pretty enough to be a leading lady and not fat enough to be a character actress," and "there are no Greek parts, so I can't get you work." Even Nia said, "how many roles were there for a robust and curly-haired loudmouth?"

Later, there's some focus on movies that...I dunno...How to Lose A Guy in 10 Days doesn't sound like it works? And I admit Love Actually is a mixed bag for sure. The movies covered towards the end seem to be there because of their being less successful, such as when you try to write a rom-com about fuckbuddying. "How do we make a romantic comedy that actually captures how people are dating and falling in love today. In almost every case, the answer turned out to be: by doing the same thing we were doing before, but with more casual sex."  Love was being reimagined, and Hollywood didn't know how to tell those stories, the author concludes. Younger performers weren't that interested, older ones got tired of it. But then there's Mindy Kaling, and Crazy Rich Asians, and some folks figuring out how to bring it back. 

Per my previous review, I'm really too tired to get into the details that I should. But if you're into this topic, I really enjoyed the takes and information in this one and give it four stars. 

Shy: The Alarmingly Outspoken Memoirs of Mary Rodgers

By Mary Rodgers and Jesse Green.

This one sounded like fun from the getgo. Mary is the daughter of famous musical writer Richard Rodgers--and her parents were real lulus to deal with growing up. Mary went into the same business for the most part, writing musicals/songs herself, "Once Upon A Mattress" being the most famous of them as far as I can tell ("Some people have a medley of their hits;  I have a memory of one."). After her musical-writing career started to go to crap, she switched to writing children's and young adult books and had a few hits with the "Freaky Friday" series. Mary is VERY frank and honest about probably almost everything she experienced (except whatever went down with Arthur Laurents, which will remain a mystery apparently), including marrying a gay abusive guy in her first marriage and the sleeping around she did in between husbands one and two, and the "trial marriage" she had with Stephen Sondheim (Vulture link), who she was VERY close with but sexually incompatible with, so that never went anywhere. She describes herself as shy, but one wonders.

She wasn't great at writing her own memoirs, so what happened was that she partnered with Jesse Green to dictate interesting stories from her life and have him turn them into a book, which is about how it reads (it's published posthumously in her case). Jesse's primary obvious contribution to the book is to put footnotes explaining who Mary's talking to (for those who don't know every famous theater person that Mary does) and occasionally making his own personal asides regarding the action or Mary herself. 

Jesse notes in his afterword that he'd expected that the stories in the book might not be true or memories might be off--but "research bore out pretty much everything she told me, no matter how outre, or perhaps even more so the more outre it was. What research did not bear out I corrected." What areas he couldn't verify, "my aim has been to say: This is how Mary saw it. Or really, with one more wrinkle: This is how I saw her see it." Her writing notes: "Make it funnier. Make it meaner." Why? "She wanted readers to have a good time, even when learning about the times she did not, and on the assumption that those readers were no saints, she wanted them to know that she wasn't, either. You could have a good life without being dull and without being perfect or great, she said, if you jumped in and kept your eyes open. Niceness was not, on its own, a virtue: It needed to be expressed in action." He notes that the stories are often in her exact words, "albeit cherry-picked from multiple conversations separated by months. When the words are not hers, they are, at her suggestion, my best ventriloquism of them; she encouraged me to think of "Mary" as a fictional character of my own devising, but one who happened to have lived within a true, if unusual, story."

Quotes from Mary:

• "...ask my kids who taught them all the bad words. I told them they could say fuck, shit, and cunt to me all they liked, but maybe not so much to an Episcopalian priest. The trick children need to learn is how to determine the right context."
• "Please excuse the loopy way I tell stories, one hooking into the next until it's hard to find the way back."
• "I don't go in for cheap psychology, only the expensive kind, but some things are just too true, too solid state, to ignore. Everyone becomes a kind of monster of what they failed to get." 
• "I know you're supposed to go in order, but chronology is no fun. It doesn't explain much, either. In real life it sometimes happens that effects come before causes--before causes are uncovered or understood, at least. And sometimes things string together across decades so tightly you'd think they had happened together."
• "Let's face it, most of childhood is the most boring prison sentence in the world, and you can't get paroled. Is it a surprise that I became, as the nursery rhyme says of me, quite contrary?"
• Mary says her parents weren't ALL bad and that there's "pushmi-pullyu" stuff going on for awhile. "They did love me, even if (as I learned) they didn't like me. I guess I could say the same about my feelings for them."... "Straight through my life, everywhere you look, they were horrible, especially my mother, about little things, but important things they were wonderful about. The trouble is, and this is key, it doesn't even out. Even in my admittedly rather eventful life, there weren't as many big things as little." 
• Why Mary got (very spontaneously) engaged to her first husband: "I didn't like the pickle I was in, a pickle in which every available boy was dull and every exciting boy was forbidden."
• "I can only say I was desperate to have some kind of life that felt like my own. I didn't yet understand how hitching your horse's ass to someone else's wagon was just another kind of servitude, worse even than being a  child. I just wanted to start." 
• "Do not seek to know how the musical theater sausage is made."
• "Why are so many men so awful? Or at least the one who came flocking to me?"  
• Mary recounts a story in which an African-American woman auditioned for a show and was rejected for guess why. The workaround devised for this shittiness was to find a makeup artist to made her up as white and then she auditioned again. THEN she got the part. I'm not sure from reading this if she had to be made up as white to do the role all the time (I hope not, it isn't clarified) but I guess it proved their point to get around the jerk who claimed that her "features" would stick out?
• "Joe Bova, whom we hired as Prince Dauntless, was a moron. Playing opposite him, Carol never knew from one night to the next what the arrogant, undisciplined little shit was going to do. He was worth it, though, if only because he was the instigation for one of the most famous ripostes in theater history. At one point he stopped a rehearsal to ask, as he made a cross that Albert had blocked, "What's my motivation?" Abbott snapped back, "Your paycheck." 
• On her various hookups: "Oh, don't look at me that way. Now everyone hooks up on aps, and Instagrams their hickeys....In a way, I was writing my obit: "a woman who tried everything." I damn well didn't want anyone else writing it for me." 
• Re: Sondheim: "He wasn't in love with me, certainly, and I wasn't really physically attracted to him. I just loved him, thoroughly enough for nothing else to matter. Do you not believe in that? Have you never seen Carousel?"
• "No one can say I didn't do everything I could, opening every door and flying through it even if I immediately fell into a pit or just smacked my face on another door."
• Upon meeting Carson McCullers: "She was a mess, the ugliest thing I'd ever seen, with scrambled teeth and short, greasy hair. When we arrived, she was lying in bed drinking Maker's Mark, with an enema bag festooned over a shower rod in full view. Whether she was drunk or not, she certainly wasn't interested in what I had to say about our approach in the project. All she wanted to do was talk about the party that the play's producers had thrown after the 1950 Broadway opening, and ask, like a demented child, whether we'd be having a party as nice as that one. I said, "Well, first we have to write the musical," but she kept on asking about the food and liquor."
• "I also told Ursula and Charlotte--in that braying way I have--that I was, despite all appearances, shy. That the shyness is what restrained the badness, except when it didn't. That if I'd only been bad, I'd have been a monster. That if I'd been only shy, I'd have been no one. I didn't know at the time that I'd struck a chord with Ursula, whose motto at Harper was "good books for bad children." All she said then was, "Write about that." 
• "Be careful of hits! They are nicer, of course, than bombs, but require so much more aftercare." 
• "It's a mortifying genre, this self-hagiography humbly disguised as an "and then I wrote" memoir. And now we come to the most mortifying part of it." I note that this is referring to her writing "Freaky Friday: The Movie," where other people added in plot elements she hated. "Everything I swore not to let happen in writing a movie, all the sexism and sitcommery, happened."
• "I wound up talking to Cosby for four hours about the "meaning" of his role. Boy, did he have theories. But so did I: that he was the most arrogant, pompous pain in the ass I'd ever met."
• On her mother again: "She was amazing and awful. It's just that her good qualities had little to do with parenting and her bad ones certainly did."
• "I always thought I'd be a better sport about my own demise." 
• "So I asked the shrink: When you're depressed because of actual things that are depressing, are there any drugs that can make you feel better? And he said no, which was even more depressing."
• Mary's farewell words to Jesse at their last session: "You have to face facts. This may be the last time we see each other. You cry so easily! I hoped we would finish this together, but you know what to do. Just please don't make it dull like Mommy's and Daddy's. Include everything, except what we can't. Otherwise, what's the point? We all fuck up and eventually putrefy, but at least I had fun. And didn't you, too?"

Quotes from Jesse:

• "In case you are wondering, Mary loved the idea of being annotated but, as was the case with the rest of the book, didn't love the actual writing. What you are reading here in the margins, and sometimes outside the margins, too, is therefore a compound of hers, mine, and ours."
• "...the time in third grade that Mary burst into French class, saying "I have something very important to announce," and then recited, "Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice, pull down your pants and slide on the ice." The school called Dorothy, who said, "You know she comes from a family where people write lyrics all the time."
• Mary, her sister Linda, and Mary's daughter Nina all wore the same wedding dress and got divorced. Mary offered it to a son's fiancee, and then thought better of it. "Actually, all the marriages from that gown were a disaster. You can't have it." 
• Jesse's most personal footnote: "No, Mary, I don't, and I'm going to come out of this footnote closet to say so. You're too hard on yourself, or hard on yourself for the wrong things." I won't type up everything he said about how women were still being raised to get married, and how people wanted her to be demure, such as her parents. "But "demure" -shy!--is something a woman of ambition cannot afford to be. To be demure is to accept the idea that one's gifts are not for opening. What kind of heroine would you be if you complied?" 
• "Mary was right about two things: I did have fun and I did not see her again." 
• "Why should anyone want to hear about the daddy (and mummy) issues of a second-drawer composer and children's book author whose greatest contribution to art, she said, was being a midwife to it?"

I dunno, I'd barely heard of Mary Rodgers (just Freaky Friday/A Billion For Boris) before this, and once I started seeing reviews of this book, I insisted on ordering it immediately, and from Amazon because I couldn't get it from any local bookstores for some reason. So I thought it was very cool :) 

Anyway, I really enjoyed it and it was fun to read. Four stars--

No, wait, let me tell you something: I'm writing this after having called in sick from work today so I could just go back to bed. I'm in shows for one musical on weekends and started another on weeknights and have had pretty much no downtime except for meals and in between scenes of the one show for a few weeks, which is where this got read. I have three books I need to write very long, in-depth reviews for and only about an afternoon (once I got out of bed/showered/laundry/ate/cleaned up a month's worth of possible outfits that are on the floor by the closet) to do them in, and I won't get them all done, for sure. I apologize to all the Seanan McGuire fans in particular because "Be The Serpent" is fucking amazing and I seriously don't have the time to write it all up yet for a review or to update the fan blog. I started this review, looked at all the bookmarks I had of stuff to mention, and thought, "No, I need to write a review skimming all this stuff, I am too tired and don't have the time." And yet I have spent most of THREE DAMN HOURS writing down all these notes, because the book is that good. I had to take the damn time I don't have to do it. So, read this if you are a theater person, for sure. 

Semi-Famous: A True Story of Near Celebrity

By Josh Sundquist. 

You maybe have or haven't heard of this fellow--he's a "Paralympian, social media star, comedian, motivational speaker, and Halloween enthusiast." I'd certainly heard of him, but for his distinctive Halloween costumes more than any of the rest of it, because guess what my priority in life is, Anyway, Josh has been interested in becoming (more) famous for most of his life, and decided to write a book about the desire for fame, how it works, the history of being famous, etc.  This is interspersed with his own experiences of trying to become famous via Paralympics, getting buff, trying to work for MTV, meeting Mandy Moore, and putting on a regular show where it's hard to get butts in the seats. There's also a school theme in which he covers history, math, science, etc. in chapters. 

Notable things:

• Covering what it's like to become a K-pop idol, which is nitpicky, disposable, horrifying, wipes out your name and personality, and racks up debt. And you can't even date any hot guys you meet. 
• Categorizing the kinds of fame: "feat famous" for when you're first at something, or otherwise getting famous for an action you did, as Josh himself has done. 
• "Face fame" is when you get recognized in public, such as his friend Pauley Perrette, who's interviewed for this book, because for the rest of her life she'll always be "Abby from NCIS." 
• Josh says that "name fame" is the best kind--it's name recognition. Names are hard to remember/harder to remember than faces, but if people recognize it, that's where you get benefits. He interviews "Piff the Magic Dragon," a Vegas magician, who's famous while in character but otherwise living normal dude life. He can be name famous without being face famous when out of costume. "He gets the best of all worlds: a stage name famous enough to sell tickets and perform onstage, but complete privacy when he's offstage....If you can figure out a way to have some feat fame and name fame without face fame, you get many of the perks of fame with few of its downsides. Examples: famous author, scientist, or movie director." 
• Analyzing fame in history: Alexander the Great was the first famous person, and fame doesn't happen without media. He mentions other celebrity "firsts" like "first celebrity to barter an image of their face" (Sir Isaac Newton). and "first unauthorized celebrity merch" (Ben Franklin). 
• I note that Josh doesn't mention he has only one leg due to cancer (though he does mention the Paralympian thing early on) until page 132. He says he didn't mention it earlier since (a) it wasn't particularly relevant until that point, and (b) did learning this make you think differently about him? And maybe that had some influence on why he never got a job at MTV? And how often do you see the one-legged in media, anyway? 
• If you want to make a living as an artist, you lose your privacy, or you keep your privacy but don't do art for a living.

I myself have made the latter choice because of being female and the odds of my being doxxed/stalked/destroyed on the Internet are extremely high if I ever get even slightly popular. Megan Fox has a quote in here about how being famous is "being bullied by millions of people constantly," and I certainly remember what happened to Lindsay Ellis, who made a one-off comment that got interpreted badly and there went everything. I think she of all people might wish she'd stayed obscure forever instead of doing what she loved. 

So I don't post anything of any interest on the wee bit of social media I have to do for acting stuff, and instead I post a lot on dying/dead mediums like obscure old school blogs so that I get my urge to share things with others off my chest, but without having any of it found or having to deal with the repercussions of sudden popularity. I act in small town community theater or online in small online venues. Everything I do is staying small, and I stick with a job that I generally hate and generally seems to hate me right back so I have the safety/money/health insurance, all of which I'd lose if I did anything I liked that is worthlesss.

It's a devil's bargain either way, I suspect. 

• If fame is stressful, why doesn't someone quit fame? It's addictive, especially the good parts.  It hurts to lose that, sayeth Justine Bateman in an interview. A therapist specializing in fame noted that nobody wanted to go back to a normal life because fame made them feel special.
• He also interviews John Schneider, who's totally cool with how things have gone for him and he always wanted fame to be his job. For him, it's been positive and he's naturally optimistic that he'll get other jobs. 
• As for Josh's own fame levels, it was the ability to YouTube his own stuff that helped him (plus the Halloween costumes). "This is not an "I struggled for a long time and eventually succeeded" story. This is an "I struggled for a long time and eventually had some experiences on the margins of viral fame" story." He notes that his costumes are "feat fame" in that people know the outfits but not his name (and probably not his face, depending on the costume). 
• That of course has to lead to discussions of trolls and the conversation he had with one. Josh made a funny video about a troll of his who claimed he was faking only having one leg, then hashed it out with him and recaps it in this book. 

What Josh learned from this experience:

• "If you're unhappy before you're famous, you'll still be unhappy after you're famous."
• Being obsessed with fame robs you of being happy now--FOMO doesn't help.
• Don't get addicted to it.
• Have true friends. 
• Separate the private and public stuff--"character splitting" (per the therapist) "it's the only possible adaptation" that can allow happiness and fame to coexist." 
• Fame is currency, spend it on something good, use it to improve the world.
• Chase passion, not fame. Become happy as a side effect of following a passion, and then happen to get famous. 

There's a lot of very good food for thought on this topic. Thank you for writing this, Josh. Here's an interview with him on the topic, as he's about to have a streaming TV show. (I'll try it out.) 

Four stars from me. 

Easy Crafts for the Insane: A Mostly Funny Memoir of Mental Illness and Making Things

By Kelly Williams Brown.

"This is about some shitty but also normal human stuff I got through, and how I did it, and also how to make comics about a skeleton version of your mother." 

This is a hard book to read because it goes very, very deep down the rabbit hole of depression fucking you up BAD. I'm reminded of Nothing To Fall Back On, another book I've read where the heroine's life went to absolute shit for several years. In Kelly's case, she got married and the marriage went to hell very quickly, Trump won the election, she injured most of her limbs very badly, she had to switch careers because she used to be in journalism (me too, girl), dad gets cancer, her cat  dies, her grandmother dies, and she has Depression From Hell that drains her relationship dry and ends her friendships with her "chosen family." And when she goes on a certain medication, she's one of those people who ends up going spontaneously suicidal, surviving the attempt, and then having to go into a mental institution. 

I will note as an FYI that should anyone consider this idea: (a) spontaneously giving it a shot isn't the best idea, (b) especially if anyone else is in the house to find what you did, (c) you will end up locked up in an institution with even more drugs and no control over your own life at all. As Dorothy Parker once said, you might as well live. Eventually Kelly gets on the right medication and gets back to enjoying life and coping again, but it's a rough road. I also note that apparently being hospitalized somehow improves the medication experience? She notes that instead of ramping up for six weeks, they just dose you and monitor you and she was fine again within a few days. Go figure. 

Oh yeah, and there's pretty stress-free crafts periodically to do (but not involving yarn, you don't get any of that in the mental institution) to help distract you and help you cope. Stuff like making tiny paper stars, skeleton-mom, dragon eggs.

"Crafting has always calmed me, made me feel better, and given my hands something to do so my brain can stop shrieking at me for one gosh darn second.

So in those 700 days, when I wasn't able to work, leave my house, or function as a human, I crafted. I couldn't write--I didn't have anything to say, plus one doesn't get much writing done when one is in bed 14 hours a day and catatonically watching MSNBC the other 10--but I could embroider, letter, teach myself block printing, cut out Bad Decision Shrinky Dink charm bracelets, make weird modular origami spheres, fold literally thousands of tiny stars, and just for good measure, make those trivets out of plastic tube-shaped beads that you then iron to melt one side.

Crafting gives me a sense of accomplishment even when I feel like I can't accomplish anything. Crafting is tangible proof that I can do something. To craft is to set things correct in tiny ways--to make this crease or that stitch or move that candle over a bit because it just looks better there--and I can almost always effect those changes in the universe. Crafting reminds me that my brain moving differently from other people's brains is not all bad thing." 

Anyway: this is more of a depression memoir than a craft book--and I dunno on the funny--but if you're down a deep hole, this actually helps to read. You go down the hole with Kelly, and then follow her back out again. Which is a relief. If reading about someone being suicidal is a bad idea for you, then skip certain chapters, but if you need reasons to NOT be, this is a good one.

Four stars. 

Ike and Mamie: The Story of the General and His Lady

By Lester David and Irene David.

When picking out presidential biographies to read, I lean towards (a) something reasonably comprehensive as to what they did in their lives/in office, and (b) any book I can find that shows some presidential personality. The last book I read on Eisenhower didn't have too much of it, but this book has it in spades. It's a dual biography of husband and wife, though it leans more towards a biography of Mamie as affected by Ike than a book that goes too much into say, Ike's presidential work. I found it lively to read and got through it very quickly, which is impressive. 

The book's argument is that Mamie was more independent and stronger than she let on in public, even though she wasn't one of the more prominent first ladies. 

Fun facts:

• Mamie's parents decided to show up the morning after their wedding at the hotel to "surprise" them with a packed family car to ride home in. Ike's reaction to this is not documented.
• Mamie lived in 37 different places, ranging from "a bat-infested shanty" to palaces to the White House.
• Mamie was raised as a rich girl, not a chef. Ike did the cooking. All she learned at cooking school was to mix mayonnaise.
• Mamie's dad had given them a car, which she did not know how to drive that particular model of (and it wasn't very reliable anyway). Nevertheless, she hauled ass to go see Ike one day at a camp, driving into ditches at least six times and somehow bouncing out, weaving into opposite lanes and ditches...luckily for her she was driving at the crack of dawn and not too many people were driving. Ike insisted on teaching her how to drive before she headed home, but eventually she stopped driving entirely.
• I felt very bad for them losing their first son, "Icky," (what a nickname), to scarlet fever. They had a second son, John, who for obvious reasons Mom was very protective of. At one point John was a pilot and Mamie enlisted pilot Jacqueline Cochran to investigate his flying situation. Jacqueline agreed once she found out he didn't have that much flying experience and talked him out of a long trip.
• Supposedly their marriage was in trouble (not exactly shocking) after their first son died. One lady suggested that Mamie, and I quote, "vamp him." I guess it worked!
• John apparently created a "Hindenburg Line" at school, where he and his buddies threw chalk at people and included the teacher. "He draws the curtain on what happened at home when his father found out, and so will we." 
• To quote an employee of theirs: "There I was, twenty-six years old, in the Army, a big boy. And she was afraid I'd hear naughty language."
• Amusingly, everyone but Ike found out before he did that he was getting his fourth star. One guy heard it on the BBC first! He cussed a lot on that topic.
• Mamie had a very good time meeting people as First Lady, shaking 600-700 hands a day. 
• Mamie got VERY upset when the dog peed on a fancy carpet, pouting about how they couldn't get the stain out for weeks. Ike's response: "Mamie, I've got a few other things more important than that to worry about." Legit. 
• The grandkids got to meet Khruschev and hit it off with him. When asked to talk about this in school, grandson David, a sixth grader, said something like "If I didn't know any better I'd be a Communist because Khruschev was such a nice guy." "It made the family kind of unhappy with me." 
• When Mamie was staying in the hospital with Ike, she specifically requested having a pink toilet seat. Of course the hospital didn't have that and they wondered if it'd be risky if they painted one but it wasn't dry on time. Reasonably presuming that Mamie had gotten one in Washington before, they called the White House and got one. FAVORITE FACT OF THIS BOOK.
• Second favorite fact: the words "He had a good bowel movement" being shared with the press all around the world. 
• Mamie got a reputation for being an alcoholic (especially during the war/Kay rumor years), but it turns out she had vertigo/Meniere's. 

A lot of the book--seriously, it's just chapters and chapters on this topic--is dedicated to whether or not Ike and his wartime chauffeur Kay Summersby had an affair or not. The authors literally interview everyone still alive and prove over and over and over again that THEY DID NOT, even if Kay published a book at the end of her life (while she was dying of cancer and presumably needed the money) indicating otherwise, mostly citing that she never said anything of the sort under normal circumstances, there would have been plenty of eyewitnesses had they been, etc. Supposedly the rumor was started by Truman, who hated Eisenhower anyway.

This book doesn't really go into Ike's work, but I note that his entire second term is talked about in only TWO PAGES and then goes one-two-skip-a-few to the end. 

But overall, I was amused and entertained, so four stars there. 

Dwight D. Eisenhower

By Tom Wicker.

Another American Presidents book series. Honestly, I found this pretty dull (I'm somewhat reminded of the boring McKinley book, but this is at least better than that), but it could just be me, my mood, or not much interest in the subject matter. Who really remembers Eisenhower anyway? He's sandwiched in between two far more interesting people.

Anyway, notable bits from this book:

• "Eisenhower was not hostile to blacks or oblivious to their problems..." but that said, apparently he wasn't into integration either. Ugh. 
• Quote from Nixon: "I was just Ike's prat boy. Ike always had to have a prat boy, someone who'd do the dirty work for him...." Uck.
• Eisenhower got razzed for Sputnik/letting the Russians beat us. Attempts to catch up didn't go so well.
• When asked to give a major idea of Nixon's, Eisenhower bitched that, "If you gave me a week, I might think of one, I don't remember." 
• Apparently a standout thing about Eisenhower was his farewell speech warning people of the military industrial complex. 
• His personal tastes and hobbies were...basically 1950's boring, to sum it up. Or as his son put it, "strictly cornball."
• He enjoyed badmouthing people too.

So so far, none of this was great, right? BUT. In the last chapter, the author finally recounts the time that he met and hung out with Eisenhower for a week while writing about his travels, and really enjoyed it and thought he was great. They flew around on his plane. "I had never supported him politically, but I was totally taken with him as a person." The author says he was a presence, never made him feel uncomfortable to be around a Great Man, had a magnetic quality to him. "I never spent another personal moment with him, but forty years later, to me, Ike is still a commanding presence." Too bad the rest of this book isn't as personable as the end of it. "In putting together this book, I have tried not to let that well-remembered presence influence my judgment or conclusions," the author states. I can see that, but maybe more personality would have helped this book?

In the end, the author dubs him "a great man--but not quite a great president." He didn't have super major incidents going on, he prevented war but didn't really make any peace, the world was about the same when he left office. "It seems unnecessary to try to make him out a great president," the author concludes.

I guess?

Two and a half stars.

The Accidental President: Harry S Truman and the Four Months that Changed the World

By A.J. Baime.

Obviously reading the last two Truman books, I found the first four months of his presidency a lot more interesting than the rest of it. Hence why I threw in a third book focusing on that. It was indeed comprehensive and bringing the situation at the time to life, which I really appreciated. This book "poses a new thesis" about how he had the most challenging four month period in any American presidency. Truman was an ordinary guy--no college, never owned his own hoe, never governed a city or state, and became president by accident, in his opinion. I'm not going to list the stuff like the author did, but it's a packed paragraph full of death, falls, victories, etc. "Never had fate shoehorned so much history into such a short period." 

Nobody really knew how the hell Truman ended up with the job, nobody seemed to know much about him and Roosevelt didn't tell him diddly and the secretaries wouldn't return his phone calls. He was pretty much picked for being the least hurtful of the ticket. Someone randomly said, "Anything can happen in this country!" 

I do think it's adorable how Truman fell in love circa age six and never loved anyone else. She was beautiful and popular, he had glasses and was a "sissy." "Harry sat next to Bess Wallace at church school. Somehow he knew already that he would devote his whole life to this one person. It took him five years to get up the courage to say hello." Circa age 26, he finally got somewhere by bringing a cake plate back to the house after her family had gone through hard times and her dad killed himself. I can't help but find that all cute.

I'm amused that the political factions in Truman's area when he first got into politics were called the Goats and the Rabbits. Also there's a quote: "Do you mean seriously to tell me that you actually believe that Truman can be nominated and elected to the United States Senate?" Then later someone says to him, "For the first six months you'll wonder how you got here, and after that you'll wonder how the rest of us got here." 

Also funny: someone calls the house at 3:30 a.m., Bess answers, and hears, "I'd like to congratulate the wife of the senator from Missouri." "I don't think that's funny," Bess yells, slams down the phone....then realizes that was one of the campaign workers. 

I think I got exhausted on bookmarking notes to take the more intense it got here.... you definitely feel bad for Truman having to make literally the worst and hardest decision in the world ever, on very little experience or ANYTHING. "I am going to have to make a decision which no man in history has ever had to make. I'll make the decision but it is terrifying to think about what I will have to decide." There's lots of details on the bomb, dealing with Churchill and Stalin, people's relief at the war ending soon... anyway, I think I've pooped out on writing this review, but these things happen sometimes. I give it four stars if you're into the topic.