Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From A Bad Neighborhood (2005) - Plot & Excerpts
This is a book of essays, so I kept reading it, hoping some of the later essays would be better. They weren't.The essays about the author's childhood were ok. I have an obsession with reading about families more messed up than mine was. Her family was fairly messed up, and the stories about growing up were more or less entertaining.The later essays, the ones about the author and her friends gentrifying a poor neighborhood in Atlanta and talking disparengingly about the people who lived there before them, really irked me. Really, if a neighborhood is too scary to live in, don't buy a house there just because it's cheap. If there's no resturaunt in the neighborhood and the closest Starbucks is six minutes away, dont' buy a house there. It seems pretty simple to me.I think these essays were supposed to be "gritty," but I thought they were mostly just pathetic.I will NOT be reading the sequal where the author reproduces, even though I have already borrowed it from the library and it's lying on my bedroom floor. I am removing it from my to-read list right now.
Don't stare too hard at the rating. I didn't think this was bad book at all. In fact, if I step back from how difficult a time I had reading it, and how long it took me to slog through, I have a lot of praise for it. But it was one of those books where the writing style just did not match up with my brain in a way that I could get into rhythm reading it. The very, very short essays that tended to begin with a pithy statement before moving into a vaguely-related anecdote wore on me very quickly. It's hard for me to read a collection of very short things in the first place, but the amount of work it took my brain to figure out what a chapter would be about meant just as I was getting into it, it was over.But: Gillespie is a clever and funny writer, and there's a lot of great stuff in here if tiny elliptical essays are your thing.For me, not so much. Like I said, don't stare too hard at the rating.
What do You think about Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales From A Bad Neighborhood (2005)?
Considering how much I like blogs, you'd think i'd like this book more, since it's really a series of "posts", most just a couple of pages in length, telling a variety of clever anecdotes about Gillespie's life.But I found it a bit tedious after a while and started skimming through the stories to hasten my way to the final page. Lightweight stories such as these are perhaps better suited for the online medium...where you can skip around easily, where comments can provide an opportunity for conversation, where there's more context and chronology. This book only confirmed the fact that I am NOT one of those people who can't wait for the next David Sedaris essay collection :)Full review in my blog:http://homepage.mac.com/elisa_camahor...
—Elisa
I wanted to like this book more than I did. I like Hollis Gillespie, and I know a lot of the people and places she writes about in this book, but the structure of it was very annoying. The shortness of the essays wasn't the problem, it was the way they all started to sound the same after a while: begin with a startling statement, then move into an anecdote, then somehow connect that to her messed-up family life. Most of the essays ended up very abruptly and felt like they'd been edited for space, which is okay for a column, but not for a book where there's plenty of space.
—Stacy
Pretty good. Funny in parts and the chapters are very short (like you could read in a less than 5 minutes which is nice). When she ended some chapters it felt a little forced - like she wanted to wrap it all up and be poignant but it felt a little..well, like I said forced. I love some of her imagery and all-in-all found the book entertaining and funny and a little sad (especially her dad). I have her other book on hold at the library so it's at least good enough for me to give another crack at her :-)
—Amy Autsema Bennett
