Take Your Shirt Off and Cry

Starred review from April 13, 2009
This funny, bravura memoir describes life as a young actress, and all the "head-banging frustration, demoralizing options, and bewildering compromises" that come with it. Balbirer begins with her time as an undergrad at New York University, using just the right combination of humor, embarrassment and righteous indignation, with just a touch of name dropping: in David Mamet's course, for instance, the playwright's first lecture posited that "Bill Cosby was a whore." A star student, Balbirer was unprepared for the real world, where work is scarce even for the very talented; working the avant-garde circuit led her to become known in "certain fringe theater circles" as "the Chick Who's Willing to Show Her Tits in the Show If Need Be." Her adventures in television include a humiliating stint on MTV's first original program, traveling cross-country for a meeting with Lorne Michaels that never materializes, and a part on Seinfeld that gets whittled down to a one-liner. Other misadventures include demoralizing casting calls, conniving friends and a string of callous boyfriends. Turning her poor-little-L.A. girl material into a read this witty, reflective and charming takes real talent; if there's any justice, that talent will find the fame it deserves among the book buying public.

March 1, 2009
Balbirer's debut recalls her scrappy formative years as a serious thespian scraping by on the margins of America's empty, celebrity-worshipping culture.

In the early 1980s, she was an NYU student, one of hotheaded playwright David Mamet's prize pupils. ("Take your shirt off and cry" is derived from a Mamet witticism about what's expected of the average Hollywood actress.) After winning her expletive-dispensing instructor's approbation, she dallied with off-Broadway bohemianism and then sprinted off to bigger things—i.e., demeaning money jobs. Her years as a full-time actress were marked by tiny victories and, more often, nagging failures, both professional and romantic. In New York, the once high-minded Balbirer soon found herself groveling before TV-biz hustlers whose biggest concern was that her breasts might be too small. She ended up playing a succession of floozies on MTV's Remote Control, and her Debra Winger impersonations landed her a grueling set of dead-end auditions with Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels. In Los Angeles, she nabbed a bit part on Seinfeld, and her career began to show signs of actual progress. But low self-esteem, sexist boyfriends and lame-duck agents seemed to lead nowhere except to obsessive bra stuffing and debilitating diets. Some of Balbirer's late-career lowlights included being rejected for a role by Luke Perry and being mysteriously fired from an unnamed popular sitcom by her"friend" Jane (no last name, though we're assured she's now an established Hollywood commodity). Later chapters show the author engaging in some tough-minded self-assessment and finally hitting upon a way to transcend her ill-fated acting career—become a writer. Balbirer's angst-filled prose is sometimes feisty and observant enough to mask the fact that this is basically a depthless memoir of obsessive success-chasing and the agony of defeat, Hollywood-style.

Unsentimental and intermittently engaging, but you've probably heard it all before.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

Starred review from April 15, 2009
It is a fact of life seldom discussed in our celebrity-mad media: most actors do not become either rich or famous. Balbirer revels in her failure in this witty, poignant, exceedingly well-written memoir chronicling the ups and downs (mostly downs) of a trained, hardworking actress who always seems on the cusp of greatness but who nevertheless always fails to make the grade. Starting with her glory days in NYUs theater program, Balbirer charts her many adventures in off- and off-off-Broadway, on television (where, for a time, she appeared on MTVs popular Remote Control), and later in Hollywood. Gossipmongers will find her stories of life in La-La Land especially fascinating, and among them, in particular, her heartbreaking tale of being cast as a guest star and then cut from an unnamed popular 1990s sitcom (not Seinfeld; she was on Seinfeld several times) at the insistence of her friend Jane, one of the shows highly paid stars. The irony is that, if Balbirers book proves as popular as her autobiographical one-woman show I Slept with Jack Kerouac and Other Stories, she may find fame and fortune by recounting the myriad ways she failed to achieve them.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)