This isn’t the type of celebrity memoir filled with frivolous name-drops and flimsy anecdotes; it’s a revealing and often harrowing journey through the life of a person who has been reviled, adored and victimized — and also just happens to be recognizable ... Fox writes casually and in the present tense, as if she’s telling her story to friends and trying to transport them to each moment in time. And yet it remains clear as Fox parses her history...that she maintains an emotional distance from much of what she writes about ... Her habit of trying to tie up loose ends works to her detriment. As a writer, she pushes herself toward tidy emotional resolutions she doesn’t appear to be ready to feel ... For someone who claims she doesn’t want to be a celebrity, Fox is pretty good at being one.
Fox makes a case for herself as one of her generation’s most authentic storytellers, cutting through niche fame and viral moments with a clarion voice and a worldly-wise sensibility honed from the thrills and near-death experiences she’s witnessed during her 33 years of life ... Fox is strikingly straightforward, taking accountability for her own role in the havoc wreaked or damage done like a true antiheroine ... With this unfiltered authenticity, Fox’s true appeal as both a writer and a persona is apparent—the memoir is a practice in radical transparency. While other high-profile memoir writers might carefully construct their narratives in the service of maintaining a calculated public image, Fox takes an unflinching look back at both the exhilarating and painful moments of her life, one that she has chronicled as only she can.
The book is not without bizarre details ... But the overall image she presents of herself is almost archetypal ... In real life, or life mediated by non-print media, Fox is fantastically fascinating. Those who dismiss her as almost-famous-for-being-famous, trying and failing to keep up with the Kardashians, miss how perfectly she’s mastered her metamorphic art of self-fashioning.
It is a wild, unrelenting ride. I wouldn’t recommend reading it in big chunks, as I did, which made me feel like I needed a brisk walk around the block or a cold compress ... Despite the fact that she is obviously still engaged in creating the performance artwork that is herself, what comes out of this book is also the sense of a real, complex person. For all the book asserts that Julia Fox is not like us, it turns out that, at root, she is. She doesn’t give a fuck, but she does. Don’t we all?
Captivating ... Utterly relentless — and moreish ... Fox’s prose can be clunky, but it can be very vivid too ... It should be a sad read, but isn’t; like Fox’s life, the pace never gives you time to stop and take it all in. The frequently wry and bluntly honest commentary makes it all seem normal, allowing you to forget that no one should have had a life this bleak ... So if it isn’t sad, what is this memoir? It is intense and compelling because Fox is intense and compelling. She is a thoroughly modern personality but in this way hers is a tale as old as time. There have always been people so magnetic that you cannot take your eyes off them, even though you cannot quite tell what is so appealing about them.
The epiphany in the final pages doesn’t quite mesh with the rest of the memoir, which, while breathless and exhilarating, reads more like a druggy, often rushed novel that could have used tighter editing. A chatty, meandering, splashy self-portrait that may appeal to fans.
