While Stone’s self-deprecating humor is occasionally endearing, the self-absorption and vapidity wear thin.
Personal essays mining the author’s struggles to improve and, ultimately, accept herself.
Stone, a freelance humor and finance writer, introduces her debut essay collection with a piece about who she was in 2004, “on the cusp of puberty, preparing to plunge into a lifetime of deep, sweaty self-hatred.” She named her prepubescent shame and anxiety Madison, described as “a phantom formed by everything I’d never be” whose message to the author was, “Everything about you is wrong and gross, and everyone can tell.” The author recounts making a list of her failings, such as “cavernous pores and…social ineptitude,” in order to work her way through them and remake herself. While this original list has since been lost, Stone’s inner critic is alive and well. “Madison’s 2004 demands were nothing compared to the round-the-clock hellscape that is the internet,” she writes. The following essay, “Nothing’s Funnier Than Naked,” begins, “I was five the first time I felt weird about my boobs.” After cataloging a series of incidents involving what she calls “body shame,” the author shares her realization that obsessing over physical imperfections comes at the cost of forging connections. In a piece that recounts the effects of religion on her lifelong perfectionism, she notes, “Childhood Evangelicalism is packed with ready-made rituals designed to annihilate the obsessive-compulsive brain.” Regarding how she eventually abandoned religion: “I ditched the church, but I kept the fear.” A self-described “insufferable goody-two-shoes” by the time she started high school, the author admits that she has “no idea exactly who or why the people-pleasing took root.” The book closes with “Madison Forever,” in which she tells us that “Madison’s still here, representing the parts of myself I’d most like to ignore.” This stands in contrast to the rest of the largely surface-level text, in which Stone maintains a hyperfocus on these parts.
While Stone’s self-deprecating humor is occasionally endearing, the self-absorption and vapidity wear thin.Pub Date: July 18, 2023
ISBN: 9780063241039
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2023
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.
A charming bird journey with the bestselling author.
In his introduction to Tan’s “nature journal,” David Allen Sibley, the acclaimed ornithologist, nails the spirit of this book: a “collection of delightfully quirky, thoughtful, and personal observations of birds in sketches and words.” For years, Tan has looked out on her California backyard “paradise”—oaks, periwinkle vines, birch, Japanese maple, fuchsia shrubs—observing more than 60 species of birds, and she fashions her findings into delightful and approachable journal excerpts, accompanied by her gorgeous color sketches. As the entries—“a record of my life”—move along, the author becomes more adept at identifying and capturing them with words and pencils. Her first entry is September 16, 2017: Shortly after putting up hummingbird feeders, one of the tiny, delicate creatures landed on her hand and fed. “We have a relationship,” she writes. “I am in love.” By August 2018, her backyard “has become a menagerie of fledglings…all learning to fly.” Day by day, she has continued to learn more about the birds, their activities, and how she should relate to them; she also admits mistakes when they occur. In December 2018, she was excited to observe a Townsend’s Warbler—“Omigod! It’s looking at me. Displeased expression.” Battling pesky squirrels, Tan deployed Hot Pepper Suet to keep them away, and she deterred crows by hanging a fake one upside down. The author also declared war on outdoor cats when she learned they kill more than 1 billion birds per year. In May 2019, she notes that she spends $250 per month on beetle larvae. In June 2019, she confesses “spending more hours a day staring at birds than writing. How can I not?” Her last entry, on December 15, 2022, celebrates when an eating bird pauses, “looks and acknowledges I am there.”
An ebullient nature lover’s paean to birds.Pub Date: April 23, 2024
ISBN: 9780593536131
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.
The comic and television personality turns serious—semi-serious, anyway—in a combination memoir and self-help book.
Handler opens these generally short essays with a memory of childhood that closes with the exhortation to keep the child within us alive into adulthood: “Hold on to that child tightly, as if she were your own, because she is.” The memory soon veers into the comically absurd, with an account of a cocaine-fueled cross-country trip with a random companion who looked like another TV personality: “I don’t know if Dog the Bounty Hunter does copious amounts of cocaine, but he sure looks like he does.” Drugs and juice are seldom far from the proceedings, but therapy is close by, too, and clearly the latter has been of tremendous use, if “exhausting in the sense that every new development or idea led to a period of intense self-awareness followed by waves of acute self-consciousness coupled with endless self-recrimination.” As the anecdotes progress, that intense self-awareness becomes less fraught. Some of her life lessons are drawn from her experiences wrestling with the yips and setbacks of performing before audiences; some turn into knowing one-liners (“I knew if three men in a row told me not to do something, it was imperative that I do the opposite”). Most, even if tongue-in-cheek or rueful, are delivered with a disarming friendliness laced with her trademark archness: Her account of a dinner opposite Woody Allen and daughter/wife Soon-Yi is worth the price of admission alone. In the main, Handler is a cheerleader for everyone worthy of cheers, and especially women. As she writes, encouragingly, “You have misbehaved, and then corrected, and then misbehaved again, and then corrected some more”—and have grown and flourished.
A pleasingly unformulaic book of hard-won advice that never rings false.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2025
ISBN: 9780593596579
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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