...a highly readable new biography ... Bennetts’ clear-eyed biography shows why this ambitious, 'stubbornly paradoxical' woman who 'wasn’t ready to cede the spotlight' continues to command our attention.
There is a lot here that’s familiar, especially if you’ve seen some of the documentaries or read some of the books that Bennetts draws from. Bennetts began interviewing her sources for this book the month that Rivers died, and it suffers from a lack of original interviews with its subject. Rivers talks a lot here, but because her comments are from extant sources, she often sounds canned — and always on, whether delivering tears or laughs ... Rivers did something else that surely a feminist would never do: She sold out other women for laughs...if there’s one thing Bennetts does in this book it is to make the case for that Rivers — the opportunistic bully, the hater ... Bennetts has a tough time reconciling Joan the Impaler with Joan the Revolutionary, and the book pings and pongs with journalistic on-the-one-hand, on-the-other equivocation.
Rather than Bennetts’s narrative of an ugly duckling desperately trying to become a swan, I’d posit that Rivers was forever trying to live out her childhood dream of becoming a serious actress ... Bennetts also describes the rise of the celebrity stylist and argues convincingly that we have Rivers to thank or to blame for the likes of Rachel Zoe...Bennetts also shrewdly sees Rivers as the forerunner of the internet denizens who police everyday women’s bodies online now.
Some of the details are ghoulish: For instance, their 19-year-old daughter, Melissa, was forced to deal with the immediate fallout of Edgar’s suicide because Rivers was undergoing liposuction when his body was discovered. Because of Bennetts’ kitchen-sink approach, some parts of the book are more successful than others. The author conducted interviews with many of Rivers’ friends, colleagues and associates, and they do much of the talking, to mixed results ... Much more thoughtful are recollections by female comedians she inspired.
Ms. Bennetts, a writer for Vanity Fair, is appalled by Rivers’s self-denigration and, even more, by her 'fat shaming,' as we now call Rivers’s type of cutting humor. Far too much of the biography is given over to this theme ... For a far more textured sense of her work ethic, I’d recommend the 2010 documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, which features Rivers hauling her own bag into chain hotels and hanging out in dingy changing rooms. This moving film also reveals a more empathetic, generous-hearted woman.
Joan Rivers was a funny person. But Last Girl Before Freeway by Leslie Bennetts captures little of that humor. Instead, it serves up lengthy quote after lengthy quote to illustrate fawning points ... could have used a good editor. The narrative meanders back and forth in time ... Another of the book’s flaws is repeating the same point several times. Ms. Bennetts seems reluctant to curate any quote or piece of information.
I'm a feminist — something Joan Rivers refused to label herself, fearing it would cut into ticket sales — and her trashing of other women made me reluctant to review Leslie Bennetts' biography of the comedy legend. But what I learned from its 432 revelatory pages is that Rivers, who played for years on sleazy stages where, as she said, 'they passed the hat but the hat didn't come back,' was an angry, driven, insecure but inspiring survivor ... Oddly, some of the material appears more than once. And do we really need a dozen people to weigh in on Rivers as a controversial plastic surgery connoisseur?
