White Girl Problems

March 12, 2012
Twitter feed phenomenon Babe Walker, the booze-fueled creation of brothers Tanner and David Oliver Cohen and gal pal Lara Schoenhals, makes the leap onto the printed page with a snarky, satirical diary/memoir of how the poor-little-rich-girl goes from the lap of luxury to rehab after a $246,893.50 shopping spree meltdown at Barneys. "I'm standing on the snowcapped mountain of my life, and the horizon looks beautiful," Babe writes in the first entry of her rehab diary, followed by: "I don't know, I just copied most of that from one of the pamphlets they gave me. I'm on a lot of Ativan right now." With a friends-and-family circle consisting of her music-industry lawyer dad, Jamaican baby nurse Mabinty, frenemy Genevieve, and gay-guy BFF Roman, Babe is a chic shopaholic in search of a labiaplasty, a therapist, a job, and true love. She's also a confessed train wreck, and giddily invites you to stare. And just when you think you might finally need to look away, there's the impossibly startlingâand hilariousâfaux insight that keeps you hooked. Take Babe's wicked grandmother (think Auntie Mame), who delivers epistolary post-mortem advice that Babe takes to heart (and to rehab): "Never cry. It causes swelling." Agent: Byrd Leavell, Waxman Literary Agency.

February 1, 2012
Poor little rich girl Babe Walker hits rock bottom during a Barneys shopping spree in this faux memoir based on a popular Twitter feed. In a town (Los Angeles, naturally) filled with the chronically self-absorbed, Babe stands out. The precocious only child of a wildly successful British entertainment lawyer and a long-absent mystery woman, Babe is raised for the most part by her Jamaican nanny, Mabinty. Mabinty smokes a lot of weed and speaks with an exaggerated patois--or at least she does in Babe's point of view, which is none too reliable. Diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder at the tender age of 7, Babe has serious boundary issues. As a sophomore, she plots to lose her virginity to her gay best friend Roman (while they are dressed as Danny and Sandy from Grease). In her teens she lobbies a series of befuddled plastic surgeons for a labiaplasty, insisting that her vagina needs to be "cute and chic-er and more...me." She steals her file from her longtime therapist, Susan, and goes to five different colleges before deciding academia might not be her thing. And when she does meet a nice guy who actually likes her, she transforms into her alter ego Babette, a slutty stalker with an unfortunate taste for tacky chain restaurants. Showing some aptitude for fashion, Babe is understandably devastated when her line of high-end dashikis for African children fails, and soon after that another romantic disappointment triggers the mother of all retail binges. After spending a cool $246,893.50 at Barneys, she cops to needing some help and sends herself to Cirque Lodge, a Utah rehab facility. Once there, she resists actually changing but manages to bond with an alcoholic former model who might actually hold a key piece to the puzzle that is Babe. A pop-culture send-up with a troubled material girl anti-heroine. Although wickedly funny at times, this odd debut takes a shallow, cavalier attitude toward mental illness, anorexia and addiction.

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