Approval Junkie

February 8, 2016
This beach-read of a memoir by comedian and culture commentator Salie is a series of essays, or more accurately, stand-up routines put to the page. The point of most of them is to win the reader’s approval by convincing us that Salie is beautiful, successful, smart, and thin, a message she smooths over by couching it in self-deprecation. She is clever enough (a Rhodes scholar, in fact) to disarm her readers with witty neologisms—her “wasband” for her ex-husband, her “noga pants,” for yoga pants in which she does no yoga—and to almost convince readers that she believes that her life, where she won a high school beauty pageant and made out with a boyfriend near Eliot House at Harvard while listening to Madame Butterfly, is just par for the course. There are some great moments in here: Salie takes responsibility for failure when she bombs an appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s show, and she is poignant and loving in describing the bond that breast-feeding created between her and her baby. When Salie is not trying to win the reader’s approval and writes from the heart, the memoir is as pleasing as they come.

March 15, 2016
Those wise enough to pick up this collection of essays are about to find their newest best friend in Salie. Sharing intensely personal information lightened with touches of humor and an appreciation for the absurdities of life, the author chronicles her first unsuccessful marriage, her second, very happy marriage, her body-image issues, and her often-changing career path. Readers may recognize pieces of their own lives in the challenges and joys of her journey and will undoubtedly find even more to emotionally connect with in Salie's awkward and endearing experiences. Plan on reading this once for entertainment, or better, twice for the life lessons available. Not content with being a Rhodes scholar, this brilliant, funny woman has a resume that includes multiple listings as a guest commentator on political and pop-culture television shows in the U.S. and England, her own National Public Radio show, Fair Game from PRI with Faith Salie, regular appearances as a panelist on NPR's Wait Wait . . . Don't Tell Me!, and a variety of acting credits.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)