LIVE WIRE

Inside the TV personality's career, marriage, cosmetic procedures, and countless other personal matters.

You can only make so many jokes about how bad your book is and what a lousy writer you are and how you don't know how to use a semicolon before readers will begin to wonder why you think you can get away with an entire essay about being stuck in traffic on the Long Island Expressway (with a semicolon error in the first paragraph). However, the intended audience for this book will not be coming for the prose style, wisdom, or even salacious secrets (if there were any, the Ripa-loving tabloids would have picked them over long ago). Fans likely possess the main takeaway: that the author is married to the hottest man alive, Mark Consuelos, whom she met when he auditioned to play her husband on the soap opera All My Children. As the author emphasizes throughout, her husband’s extraordinary physical attractiveness is rivaled only by his Olympian sex drive. Ripa's signature shticks include self-deprecation (bra size "32 AA long," she got “married during the Cretaceous period"), know-nothingism ("I bid a hasty adieu, which means goodbye in either German, French, or English, I think"), and repetition. The latter is on full display in her description of how she and Richard Gere aided an accident victim at Anjelica Huston's birthday party at Jimmy Buffett's house. "Something you’ve probably surmised by now, dear reader, is that I have a hard time ending things. Or rather, I have difficulty knowing how to begin the ending of things. You should have seen the lengths of these ‘short stories’ before they were edited," Ripa tells us in an epilogue, but the last essays—nearly 50 pages about her children’s college choices—certainly escaped the pruning shears, showcasing an unfortunate tendency to mistake clichés for insight.

If you just want to hang out with Kelly, that's exactly what you'll get.