Anna Fields (2) (1981–)

At first this was going to be a humorous YA fiction title: WRONG!

It was a non-fiction semi-biography of a name-dropping supposed-to-be famous actress and her life as a failed debutante.

The book was simply written, redundant, & boring. The author clearly didn't learn much in her English classes; her manner of writing makes her sound uneducated, which apparently is not the case.

She wrote quite a bit about her friend, Alma, who died in a car accident while driving the author's car. No explanation what happened, how it happened.... and basically that was the end of Alma. Miraculously the car returns later in the book, sort of like an after-thought.

This was poorly written, not funny, and lacked substance.… (mais)

The Girl in the Show is an alternate history of women in comedy. It tries very hard to frame women comics’ careers in terms of sexism preventing their success. The interviews are interspersed with feminist rants that have nothing to do with the industry or the women in question. The entire second to last chapter is Fields’ take on Roe v. Wade.

Fields calls the women comedienne-ballerinas (the inscription on Gilda Radner’s tombstone), which is pointlessly laborious. But half the comedienne-ballerinas she interviews avoid or deny her angle, despite her pressing the issue. They keep insisting that success comes from hard work and personal development. If you learn to make people laugh, nothing can stop you. That’s advice Fields doesn’t seem to want to hear. If you’ve followed the industry closely (as I have for nearly 60 years), the women’s stories are very familiar, because they’re almost identical to the men’s stories. Comedy is a profession. You need to apprentice. You need to listen, practice, hone, adapt, and fail. And repeat. For life. You put up with abject misery, insults, negativity and outright blockages. For decades. But you build a brand – consistent, dependable, recognizable. Most young comics fail completely, because their approach is that the audience must accept their Attitude, honed in high school, and accept their laugh lines, which are few are far between. The good ones invent a persona and grow it over years. It does not come from just showing up. And while women have significant additional prejudices to overcome, they suffer the same ugly family situations, miserable childhoods, and lack of breaks that men undergo. You need determination, an open mind and a thick skin, but Fields’ blames the externality of sexism in the case of women. She rails at length against the (often self-imposed) restrictions on Lucille Ball’s character Lucy Ricardo, but completely ignores the fact that 99% of sitcom males are jerks, incompetents and submissives. Playing those characters is no less demeaning for men than the roles some women get. Fields then goes off in a very defensive direction, criticizing the world for making comedienne-ballerinas dress nicely, be attractive, speak without inflections, and generally – fit better than their own inclinations.

This is not an investigative book. Fields does not approach it as journalism. She is here to make a point, and her interviews are slanted to make it. She presses comedienne-ballerinas when she doesn’t get the answer she wants, and eventually several come around to agreeing that feminism is key to women in comedy. It reads like they’re trying to be polite to her.

For Fields, the patroness-saint of comedy is Gilda Radner. She pops up repeatedly in nearly every chapter, and appreciatively, as a martyr for the feminist cause. She and Lucy get the most ink. Fields asks pretty much everyone a variation of What would Gilda say?

At bottom this is a book about and promoting feminism, using women comedians as its whipping child. They deserve better.

David Wineberg… (mais)

There were things I loved and things I rolled my eyes at in this book. First of all, I want to say I did not pick this book up expecting it to be the end all and be all of memoirs - I expected something light and fluffy, and it was exactly that. My issues with the book were, in spite of some flashes here and there of laugh out loud humor, the first half of the book was fairly boring. It wasn't until the story spiraled into a "tell all" regarding notable names like Julia Stiles, Julia Roberts, Diana Ross and other celebrities that it started to get more interesting... if not a little dramatic.

While I enjoyed learning about the south from Anna Field's point of view, I think she was not as much a rebel as she tries to make herself out to be. I mean, rebel or no, she still attended a well-off girls finishing school, went through all sorts of classes and rebelled in ways that kids in every day schools do. In spite of that rebellion, everything was taken care of for her, she wasn't thrown out of school, she still got an ivy league education and it was just hard to feel sorry for the poor, oppressed girl from the South.

I can't whole-heartedly recommend this book, but I will say this: If you want a book that will give you some fun sayings, some interesting looks at how the "rich" of the south live, then I'd at least skim through it.… (mais)

Anna Fields, you had me at You can take the girl out of the South, but you can’t take the South out of the girl! I love nothing more than reading a story set in the south, or devouring a good memoir. When I heard that a book was coming out that had the best of both worlds, I knew I had to read this book.

I was literally jumping with joy when I got my advanced reader copy of Confessions of a Rebel Debutante in the mail last month. I knew I was going to love it, and love it I did. Anne Fields not only has written a charming, funny and fabulous memoir, but she tells a great story about what happens when a North Carolina society girl gets kicked out of cotillion classes and doesn’t make it as a deb. You can not believe where this Rebel Deb’s life leads her.

Anna Fields deliciously describes her childhood and what life was like going through (and eventually getting kicked out of) cotillion was like, beginning at age eleven, all the while making fun of everything about debbing including herself down to her big butt. After seeing her photo on the back of my book, I had a hard time believing she was ever fat, because she reminds me a little bit of Reese Witherspoon. But she forces me to believe it with tales of being a tall girl who wore glasses and had bad skin and a white girl ‘fro after reading her hilarious cheerleading tryout story to the tune of Too Legit to Quit.

To read the rest of my review, visit my blog here:

http://thegirlfromtheghetto.wordpress.com/2010/04/17/confessions-of-a-rebel-debu...… (mais)