Cintra Wilson

Poor Liza Normal!

This was a fun book for someone my age to read; Liza and I are roughly the same age, so many of the cultural references were a real blast from the past. Her high school experiences were so poignantly awful but funny at the same time.....I imagine Liza in middle age looking back and laughing at her young self.

While I could never really understand her quest for fame I have seen other people dream the same dreams as Liza and experience similar hard truths about the nature of celebrity.......you might fall in love with fame, but it doesn't care about you.

My favorite characters were Liza's grandmother, Noreen, her brother Ned and her best friend Lorna, I thought they had the best qualities and made the most positive influences on Liza. Most of them had happy endings, and good for them!… (meer)

I was trying to describe this book to a friend, and the closest I could come up with was "It's like if Tom Robbins and Maureen Dowd had a sordid one-night stand at some trashy producer's party in the Valley, and nine months later this brilliant and vicious woman sprang forth fully formed from the forehead of the editor of US Weekly."
But better than that.

I'm just sorry I didn't read it right when it came out--the world of fame and celebrity has gotten so much MORE grotesque since 2000 that I bet Ms Wilson would be spinning in her grave if she were dead. Which luckily she isn't, so I hope she'll write an update.… (meer)

I love Cintra Wilson; I may have mentioned this before.

Her writing is hilarious and sort of gruesome, which lends itself well to an examination of the colossal fuckup that we Americans now find ourselves in the middle of.

The only thing is that it seems to have been published right before the last election, and it would have been nice to have that whole situation included.

Denise: It's hard to say whether this would be a good book club book--maybe not if you have a lot of people with delicate sensibilities. But as an antidote to Ishmael it would be perfect. (Though both are pretty lefty, they definitely come at it from completely different perspectives!)… (meer)