Unqualified

May 15, 2017

Star of the CBS hit comedy Mom and a veteran of numerous films, Faris is probably best known for "Anna Faris Is Unqualified," a podcast launched in 2015 that averages two million downloads a month. Here's another funny celebrity memoir with advice, focusing on the grand game of finding and keeping love. With a five-city tour.

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August 15, 2017
The comedic actress and podcaster reflects on her career journey and offers advice on relationships.In the effusive foreword to his wife's book, actor Chris Pratt notes that a similarity they share is their reliance on people's tendency to underestimate them--a possible hint for readers to anticipate something more than the routine narrative that follows. Faris, best known for her roles in the Scary Movie franchise and the TV sitcom Mom, does little to raise the bar of what can best be described as equal parts Hollywood coming-of-age story and celebrity-as-relationship-adviser brand-building exercise. The author's background story is fairly uneventful. She grew up in a Seattle suburb in a loving, supportive family. In high school and college, she appeared in a few local stage productions, which sparked a continued interest in acting, leading to auditions and minor film and TV work. After falling in love with a co-star from an early film, Ben Indra, she followed him to Hollywood, where she landed a few breakout film roles. Her eventual marriage to Indra didn't work out, but shortly thereafter, she met Pratt, and their relationship quickly blossomed and continues to endure. As a writer, Faris has her moments. She has an engaging voice and is capable of expressing a distinct point of view. She is most affecting in her occasionally bittersweet reflections, as she recounts stories about working in the industry, her anxieties and frustrations about auditioning, and the personal challenges of dealing with aging in Hollywood (she recently turned 40). Unfortunately, there are far too many self-conscious references to the fact that she's writing her first book. Her story is also loaded with unnecessary filler--e.g., chapters revolving around relationship themes and advice from her popular podcast Unqualified and random lists ("Sex on the Beach and Thirteen Other Things that Sound Better Than They Are") that are presumably intended to engage her podcast audience. A mildly compelling celebrity memoir primarily for fans of the author's podcast.

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January 22, 2018
Faris—actress, producer, and host of the Anna Faris Is Unqualified podcast—narrates this lighthearted mix of autobiography and ruminations on love and relationships. As narrator, Farris projects the down-to-earth persona that fans of her character on the sitcom Mom would expect, with whimsy mixed with grit. The podcast elements take on a conversational tone, with audience shout-outs and asides, while the memoir portions seem more like a traditional author-read audiobook production. The anecdotes from her marriage to actor Chris Pratt (which ended just before the book’s publication) shift confusingly between past and present tense in the audiobook. But this ties into a recurring theme of Faris’s narrative: that complete closure in matters of the heart doesn’t really exist. The audiobook will likely be of greatest interest to fans of Faris’s podcast, rather than finding a broader audience. A Dutton hardcover.