PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewGorrindo’s prose is inviting and fluid, and her storytelling is intimate and vivid. But while she renders her own history with insight, the other wives are drawn with less nuance ... What comes across powerfully in Gorrindo’s telling is the labor of accommodation and compliance.
Selma Blair
PositiveNew York Times Book ReviewBlair became an actor, but her memoir, Mean Baby, opens with sentences that echo the rhythms and concerns of her early idol [Joan Didion] ... You have the flat declaration about Los Angeles, you have the movie business, you have neurasthenia, elegantly expressed ... Mean Baby is not an illness memoir. It is a traditional autobiography, in that it covers the whole of Blair’s life so far. But M.S. haunts the book ... Blair’s disease offers her a new way to see her past, and she uses it to divine her own history ... Blair describes her childhood in a series of evocative anecdotes. While they sometimes seem like notes one might use to tell a story rather than an actual story, together they accumulate power, especially those about her mother ... She is discovered and off for Los Angeles. Once Blair makes the cross-country move, her book loses some of the spell cast by the early section. At one point, she uses the phrase \'all the charming people I had shared something with during my Hollywood life\' — that’s the vibe of these pages ... Blair also told her [story] in a recent documentary, Introducing, Selma Blair, an intimate film that does some work the book doesn’t. From the memoir alone, I didn’t get a visceral feel for Blair’s symptoms ... \'I have no ability to organize. I can only choose one memory at a time,\' Blair writes of the way her mind works these days. Where the book reflects this is also where it has the most power, in the memories Blair handles one by one ... A generous, moving book.
