An intensely self-aware and cheerfully self-revealing memoir. Blair explores the abundant darkness arising from her fraught relationships with her mother, men, alcohol and, ultimately, multiple sclerosis. In different hands, this might make for a more painful read. But throughout her breezy narrative, Blair’s wry humor and her chatty, confiding tone make you feel that you’re spending 300 pages with a smart and, yes, slightly bratty new friend ... Despite its darkness, Mean Baby is also entertaining, particularly when Blair writes about her friendships ... She offers brutally honest accounts of her symptoms and struggles, including frequent falls, inability to focus, memory loss and incontinence. As she did in the 2021 documentary film Introducing, Selma Blair, Blair renders these disheartening details with humor. This is no pity party ... The documentary delivers the full weight of her condition in a way the book cannot ... As a fellow MS patient...I would have liked to read more about Blair’s course of treatment leading up to her decision to undergo HSCT, or hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation, a Hail Mary approach that is generally considered only when all other therapeutic options have been tried and failed. But Mean Baby is not WebMD. Blair’s memoir of her life thus far is funny and frank, a chance to spend time with a brave and big-hearted woman who’s grown up to be not so mean, after all.
Blair 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.
Ms. Blair presents these and other shockers with a matter-of-factness that can be viewed as a coping strategy or as frustrating glibness ... Readers who are hoping for some dropped names won’t be disappointed ... Ms. Blair engages with her MS starkly and movingly...Still, Mean Baby is tough going. Some of the trouble can be put down to an abundance of 'look, Ma, I’m writing' turns of phrase ... But much of the difficulty in Mean Baby comes from witnessing Ms. Blair’s ceaselessly bad decision-making ... To her great credit, Ms. Blair puts it all out there. And—God love her—she knows she’s no picnic.
... offers a biting, emotionally poignant account of the Hollywood star's life ... As Blair sheds the labels that have stuck to her throughout her life, she also unburdens herself of weighted perceptions, and settles into a redemptive narrative ... Blair gets excruciatingly candid about the traumatic experiences that have shaped her life, tackling issues such as alcoholism, sexual violence and suicide ... The brilliance of Mean Baby lies in its bruising honesty and introspection. By providing an unflinching chronology of her personal experiences – triumph, devastation, and all the messy gray areas – Blair offers the reminder that while we may be a patchwork of our social experiences, we always possess the ability to transcend the labels and reclaim the truth of who we are.
Mean Baby is on one level a charming and disarming 'memoir of growing up,' as its subtitle puts it. Blair is a talented writer. Her portrait of her formidable mother, Molly, is beautiful, disturbing and acutely readable ... But this is no frothy celebrity memoir. Pain is at the heart of Mean Baby ... There are plenty of celebrity memoirs that tell stories about recovery. While Blair’s is well-written and self-accountable, it stands out because it asks the right questions. Many understand that substance abuse is self-medication. As to what it is we’re medicating against — well, that’s the real story.
The passages recounting her childhood are particularly strong, managing to evoke the sense of a highly spirited, funny, but troubled young soul ... Written in vignettes and sharply observed, the sometimes harrowing subject matter never weighs Mean Baby down. At times, you feel like you shouldn’t be having quite as much fun as you are but Blair has a self-awareness, wit and charm that makes her sound like a competition winner despite the difficulties she’s faced ... Given what she’s endured, Blair would be entitled to some anger. But she greets her health problems with humour and stoicism: she sometimes wets her pants, but she tells us she’s lucky as she has more pants. And we’re lucky to be along for the ride.
The first thing to say about Mean Baby by Selma Blair is that it would not have been published if it hadn’t been written by a celebrity. The second is that it was clearly written by Blair and not a ghostwriter. The third is to wonder about the editorial process, which seems to a critical eye to be largely non-existent, in a book that reads like a first draft outpouring from start to finish, with little refinement throughout ... On the face of it, there is plenty of interesting, important material ... while these subjects are repeatedly referred to, they are rarely scrutinised, as if Blair has confused reiteration with depth. The repetitions slow the narrative; there is little in the way of momentum. Part of this is explained by Blair’s arrested development, how she keeps repeating the same mistakes as the years go by. The tone can be self-pitying and there is the overarching sense that the author lacks perspective on much of what she’s discussing – at least, that’s how it comes across on the page. Questions such as, 'Can you believe it?', or multiple exclamation points within a single paragraph to highlight perceived injustices, attempt to get the reader on board but instead work to alienate us from the anecdotes of a difficult, privileged upbringing ... The book is all tell, very little show, full of feelings with a capital F ... the celebrity titbits enliven proceedings ... Blair is at her best when writing about her experiences of rejection as an actor ... Other successes in Mean Baby include candid descriptions about life with MS, and the portrayal of Blair’s mother as, by turns, clever, callous, caring. Her vanity and desperation as she ages are particularly well done, like a real-life Blanche du Bois ... Too often however, the insights are trite, related in language that is pedestrian, hackneyed or sometimes ... the story of a woman who wanted all her life to know what was wrong with her, but by the book’s end, this mean reviewer feels that the mystery remains largely unsolved.
It is a pleasure to report that Selma Blair’s Mean Baby rises above the dismal mean. Where others are lifeless excursions into hubris, Mean Baby exudes an air of genuine self-reflection, a grounded modesty ... Blair is so good at writing about personal strife that the industry tittle-tattle portion is surprisingly lackluster ... Maybe she hasn’t 'conquered' her traumas, but Blair has articulated them clearly and cleanly, and that in itself is a kind of triumph.
Illuminating and authentic ... The book’s first and third parts, covering her childhood and her MS diagnosis (along with the birth of her son), respectively, are spellbinding. While the middle section that follows her career lags at times, it does little to take away from Blair’s compelling story and remarkably good writing.
hough the narrative occasionally meanders, the author offers a sharp, memorable account of her roles as celebrity and MS advocate that will have wide appeal to both fans and general readers alike ... A moving and eloquent memoir.
Bold and candid ... Blair’s recollections are harrowing, but they affectingly set the stage for a story of triumphing over one’s afflictions as she chronicles her path to becoming an actor ... Blair, in her typical fashion, finds a way to transform her burden into an opportunity, sharing her experience of living with MS with astounding candor and grace. This compassionate and intelligent work will leave fans floored.
