Confessions of a Rebel Debutante

March 8, 2010
Although Fields, a standup comedian and writer for As the World Turns
, bemoans non-Southerners who “prefer to believe I grew up with Jim Bakker–style televangelists hoarding Confederate silver,” she dishes out plenty of stereotypes when recounting her own missteps up North—New Yorkers, for example, are “crammed into tiny little apartments... like sardines” and they all dress in black, and the subways are just awful. Fields's memoir skips from one set of anecdotes—boarding school in North Carolina, college at Brown, misadventures in Hollywood, living as a struggling writer in New York—to another, with occasional digressions intended to reflect a down-home common sense leavened by a rebellious streak. (As she remarks early on, she was groomed to be a debutante, but never did get to have her coming-out party.) Most of her stories are, however, unremarkable, and neither her experiences nor her insights stand out. Things pick up when she begins taking gratuitous swipes at celebrities she's encountered, from Julia Stiles (arrogant) to Diana Ross (“crazy-ass”); a later misadventure working for one of Bravo's Real Housewives
reads like a Nanny Diaries
knockoff. The overall effect is occasionally entertaining but ultimately ephemeral.

March 15, 2010
Anyone who has ever been a debutante or a rebel knows that the two involve mutually exclusive attitudes, yet Fields takes what should be an oxymoronic state of mind and makes it work for her like some crazy hybrid confection: soft on the outside, hard in the center. From childhood high jinks in a sleepy southern town where she tried but failed to achieve vaunted deb status, to becoming a soap-opera scriptwriter in the heart of demon Yankeeland, Fields chronicles a lifetime of near-miss disasters that pile up like so much roadkill. Following the lows of Brownies and boarding school with the highs of Brown University and Beverly Hills, Fields escapades resemble a Six Flags over Georgia thrill ride as she endures further demeaning stints as Diana Rosss personal assistant and on-demand tutor to the gnarly teenage daughter of a reality TV star. Armed with her What would Scarlett do? mantra, Fields shows how a rebellious southern belle can survive almost anywhere.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)