Everybody Curses, I Swear!

November 15, 2016
The career arc of a TV personality who has "made a career and an art form out of swearing."First-time author Keagan--the host and producer of VH1's Big Morning Buzz Live and the co-creator and lead anchor of YouTube's No Good TV--has thrived with her alternative to the tame, publicist-approved celebrity interview; instead, she encourages her invitees to be spontaneous and unfiltered, including the freedom to curse. When she tells her guests that "anything goes," they drop their guards and admit they feel liberated. While they are unrestricted, the challenge for her was to walk "a fine line between being fun & friendly, flirty & filthy, and being respectable...while I was being R-rated, the goal for me and my writers was to do it with intelligence and precision. More Howard Stern than Stuttering John." Through her thousands of interviews, Keagan has learned that celebrities have "a penchant for profanity," and she encourages readers to embrace vulgarities and reject prudish, proper language. Under the pretense of being authentic, the author describes Hollywood players and the pecking order with hundreds of inane synonyms for sex acts and body parts. This extends to dozens of sophomoric expressions for her own breasts. Keagan also includes several interview transcripts (Sandra Bullock, Nelly, Matt Damon, Quentin Tarantino, and others); unfortunately, they aren't especially humorous on the page and will make readers wonder if they were funnier on-screen. Despite the author's endless enthusiasm and claims that these conversations were transgressive, they just don't translate to print. Readers who agree with Keagan's premise that "people tend to get too hung up on words instead of the intent behind them"--or enjoy reading dozens of instances of celebrities swearing--will find plenty to entertain, but the author's lack of sophistication and pointed social commentary make this 400-plus-page book a chore.Though her approach might be a "shock to the system" for some, it will be crass and tedious to many.

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November 1, 2016
As one of the cofounders of the YouTube channel No Good TV in 2007, Keagan made a name for herself with candid and curse-laden interviews with celebrities. Her memoir opens with her first utterance of a curse-word: the f-bomb at the age of three aimed at her grandmother. Bullied as a teen for the size of her breasts, Keagan eventually found solace in modeling and music internships before moving to Los Angeles and taking a job working for composer Hans Zimmer. But it was meeting Kourosh Taj, who would become her partner for No Good TV, that really changed Keagan's life and began her career as an on-air personality. Keagan peppers her memoir with some of her more memorable interviews with such celebrities as Denzel Washington, George Clooney, Justin Timberlake, and Heath Ledger, and she also shares personal anecdotes from her climb to famesuch as posing for Playboy but refusing to do nude shotsthat illustrate how she kept her head up (and her clothes on) during her rise to fame. A wild, raucous read.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)