Customer Reviews

All the Wrong Men and One Perfect Boy: A Memoir

5 star:		(13)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

reading this chronicle of spike's life as a professional victim felt rather like watching a train wreck. true, it is a quick and engaging read, but i found that my patience for her endless poor choices and impulsive, irresponsible behavior wore thin quite quickly. rather than examining how she might work to create the self-esteem necessary to protect her from her bad choices (or addressing the hard-core substance abuse that paves the way for every one night stand, enables her to enter into highly dysfunctional long-term relationships, serves as an easy excuse for her lack of judgement with regard to her son, and does so much to further damages her already troubled relationship with her father), she spends her time viciously blaming everyone else for her unhappy experiences. yes, her life has been tough in a way that will ring true for many, and it is impressive that she has created a successful writing career by mining that source material, but it seems to me that all of her life's disasters were equally of her own making.

spike's life and the way she writes about it both seem chock full of the inconsistency and self-serving double standards so common in the pathologically self-absorbed. to cite just one example, she claims that her husband's drinking and use of xanax were primary factors in her decision to leave her husband, only to later detail yet another of her many drunken binges and her own use of prozac.

ultimately i was bored by her constant griping and desperate need for sympathy, and concerned by how little she actually seems to grow as a person during the course of her narrative. yes she has survived and, hopefully for her son's sake, is trying to create a healthier life for herself, but unfortunately i suspect that there are many more bad choices ahead for this woman.

The book isn't badly written, in the sense that the writing style is smooth and well-executed. However, the story itself is a flat tale of someone with a serious martyr complex. Some people seem to thrive on feeling sorry for themselves. Spike is one of these people. Her world is filled with one-dimensional characters, most of them evil, sick, crazy men. Reading Spike's tale, you get the feeling there's a lot more to the story than what she claims. The truly interesting book would be one where these "wrong men" had a chance to respond to her version of events. Some look at Spike as a "feminist". To me, she's everything feminism should be against: Ultimately weak, whiny, desperate for sympathy and approval...not to mention perpetually defining herself by the men in her life. Henry is the only sympathetic character in the whole sad tale. Too bad that by the time Spike has at last put her life in order, Henry will be the one writing whiny, self-deserving "confessions" about how his mother set him on the path to find "all the wrong women".

I enjoyed Spike's writing. She is a very talented writer. She's also clueless.

I know it's the popular thing to blame other people for your own screw ups, but how about some personal responsibility for a change? As a woman with a messed up marriage myself, I can partially sympathize, but I face reality... I am responsible for the situations I put myself in. Just me. Just like Spike is the only person to blame for every screw-up she's written about in her life.

I was left wondering if her son will end up blaming her for all his screwed-up relationships like she blames her father for her own. I wonder if that's what she wants? It is the example she's setting.

Anyways, all the blaming, whining and ranting in the book gets tiresome... maybe it'd be great in a short internet column, where I guess she's made her mark, but it's just not enough to make for a decent book.

I guess there's value in this book, if you need to know for certain that there are some people with lives more messed up than yours... but that's what Jerry Springer is for, isn't it?

Want to buy this book? My copy is going to be in my local used bookstore tomorrow... you can pick it up real cheap there.

Ummmmm. I had a hard time feeling much sympathy for the protagonist here. She bashes everyone she was involved with, with maybe the possible exception of Henry's father, probably because he was the father of her son and maybe also because he was so weak and passive that he never threatened her in any way. Everyone else seems to have incurred her screaming, shrill wrath.

She strikes me as scared, immature, and ultimately incapable of mature love with a man. The only genuinely caring portraits are of her son and a few platonic friends. I was left with the strong suspicion that she's never going to have a decent relationship with a man, wondered if she agrees with that, and if so, how she has come to terms with that.

There's no reflection here, no detachment from the raw, vivid experience. No reflection on herself, or on the psychological grounding of key characters like her father, her mother, even the men, just a recitation of the ways she's been hurt. You can almost see Spike as the sort of destructive, solipsistic - and yes, deluded person --who might try to, say, set fire to her ex-lover's house, and if someone tried to stop her, then of course she would call them controlling and abusive and repressive. She glories in being the victim, because it gives her a chance to assert anger and control, and she gets off on that.

One example of this solipsism, maybe even pathology, is the over-the-top bit where she claims her "revelation" is from the trinity of "me, myself, and I" - that her fetus or unborn child is some sort of angel who came down by choice to be aborted in order to deliver Spike from her bad marriage choice. Another is the strange thing she hints at about her relationship with Henry being exclusive, inaccessible to any of the men in her life, because of the triangular nature of such relationships. She ends the book wanting to be alone with her son, with a strange if not actually sick fixation on him (a "perfect" little boy?). I would have liked to see her explore the nature of that relationship more.

She's also spent a lot of time thinking about her hurt and stewing over her hatred. A lot of time figuring out what was wrong with each of her lovers: It runs all over the board from too talkative to not talkative enough; too distant and emotionally unavailable to too clingy; too much of a dirtbag blue collar loser to too much of a yuppie drone. But she doesn't seem to have spent much time thinking honestly about what might be wrong with herself, whether she bears any responsibility for her choices, and she doesn't talk at all about what, if anything, she's learned.

In short, at the end of the book, she doesn't seem that different than the character she started out at as. If she was in denial starting out, she is in denial still. Denial about what motivates her and who she is as far as we can tell, because she doesn't write about it. She never gains self-knowledge. Doesn't seem to have grown.

Maybe if she had, this book might be more profound, and less ironic.

In a way, Ms. Gillespie's book is something of a Rorschachtest, so that reviews of it may say more about the reviewer than aboutthe book. Or as much anyway.

In any case, it is a fact that most readers, reading this book, will have to find a way to defend against the protagonist's repeated mistakes with men, especially when those mistakes dabble in self-degradation. Some readers will identify directly with the protagonist and share her outrage at the world; others will take on the role of truth-telling friend and want to shake her; still others will push her away in disgust, write a review that takes her on as a writer (never mind the work she has produced), or announce (in a way that has more curse than conviction to it) that her young son will surely suffer for the life she has led, for the book she has written. But finally, surely, some will see this book for what it is: one woman's exploration of the truth of her own life.

Yes, this is difficult material. The drunken scene in New York, which the protagonist seems barely to recall, reminded me of nothing so much as the climactic scene in Andre Schwarz-Bart's The Last of the Just, in which the protagonist degrades himself to the point that he imagines himself a barnyard animal. And like that protagonist, Ms. Gillespie's too seems not to understand why she suffers so. Or if she does, it doesn't seem to help her stop making the same mistakes. But she struggles and works at it. And has friends who help her. And a son whom she clearly adores and sees as his own delightful person.

I must admit I wonder at those who would deny her this, or who overlook it in their outrage -- punishing her, I suppose, for not living her life as they would. No doubt this is simply an indication of how powerfully written this book is that it would elicit such vehemence.

I couldn't take anything from this book because I was too busy worrying about Gillespie's child the whole time. It seems she is always either drunk, in bed with a stranger, or assuring herself that she is doing a great job as a mother. Her friends who help with her son seem very nice but I wonder if they don't secretly think she's a terrible mother.

I wanted to like this book. I was excited to get started reading it. But her victim mentality (blaming everything on her father) and her lack of practical concern for her kid just made me nuts

I started this because a friend told me about it, but I couldn't finish reading it. The writing is sometimes funny, sometimes poignant, but the overall tone is relentless anger and blame of others. I simply didn't care enough about the protagonist to stick with it. For a memoir that shows some self-awareness, try Russell Baker's "Growing Up," or Rick Bragg's "All Over But the Shoutin'," or Frank McCourt's "Angela's Ashes."

I guess my biggest problem with this book is that I didn't really believe Spike. This book, this writing, didn't seem to be the "truth" it claims to be, about either her, her lovers, her dad. I wondered not only if her view of things was twisted, but if certain events in her book ever actually happened. I got the idea that she destroyed relationships purposely so she'd have something to write about, because that's who she wants to be. She wants to be who's lived through horror. Began to wonder if there is any kind of man she wouldn't hate, or if there was any sort of intimacy she's capable of, without swinging from initial mania and happiness to the recurring "revulsion" at having sex.

I've been reading Spike online for a few years now, and I used to love her columns and look forward to them. She exhausted me, though, and the book is just more of the same. I couldn't even finish it. I like people who learn from their mistakes. Instead, Spike seems to be finding grand truths from her experiences, but ultimately she runs up against the same stumbling blocks.

Her writing is good, but that's not enough to carry the book.

But I don't think so. I found the book tedious, self-indulgent. It made me feel like, I hope the protagonist can someday grow up, become adult, and gain maturity. Maybe that's what it was supposed to do, and maybe that's its stroke of brilliance. Could it be? We hate this character this time, but will be amazed at her growth in the future. Some reviewers seem to have jumped to volume three, but I'm still here judging only on the text we've been given. And it's pretty sad, pretty poorly written, pretty vicious, pretty juvenile. Postmodern lit is supposed to not have to explain stuff like this. You see it and you go, "Oh, I get it, to be in on the joke, I admit I was almost taken in, but now I understand. The protagonist isn't self-absorbed and vain and selfish. It's a satire on modern life." But I couldn't quite make that leap. I think it's bad lit.