Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood [Paperback]

Hollis Gillespie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 28, 2005

Drawing on her peripatetic childhood as the daughter of a travelling salesman, and her adult residence in one of Atlanta's seedier crack neighbourhoods, columnist and NPR commentator Hollis Gillespie has assembled a comic, poignant memoir about her life, starring her unusual family and her crazy friends.

NPR commentator Hollis Gillespie's outrageously funny–and equally heartbreaking–collection of autobiographical tales chronicles her journey through self–reckoning and the worst neighbourhoods in Atlanta in search of a home she can call her own. The daughter of a missile scientist and an alcoholic travelling trailer salesman, Gillespie was nine before she realized not everybody's mother made bombs, and thirty before she realized it was possible to live in one place longer than a six–month lease allows. Supporting her are the social outcasts she calls her best friends: Daniel, a talented and eccentric artist; Grant, who makes his living peddling folk art by a denounced nun who paints plywood signs with twisted evangelical sayings; and Lary, who often, out of compassion, offers to shoot her like a lame horse.

Hollis's friends help her battle the mess of obstacles that stand in her way–including her warped childhood, in which her parents moved her and her siblings around the country like carnival barkers, chasing missile–building contracts and other whimsies, such as her father's dream to patent and sell door–to–door the world's most wondrous key–chain. A past like this will make you doubt you'll ever have a future, much less roots. Miraculously, though, Gillespie manages to plant exactly that: roots, as wrested and dubious as they are.

As Gillespie says, "Life is too damn short to remain trapped in your own Alcatraz." Follow her on this wickedly funny journey as she manages to escape again and again.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this zesty memoir, NPR commentator and flight attendant Gillespie riffs on everything from her work as a "bad German translator" to her belief that a lesbian ghost is haunting her house. Gillespie, a hard-living bleached blonde who yearns to own a house, is as charming as a friendly drunk who says one funny, impossible sentence after another. She chronicles her life in diminutive essays, with an appreciation for absurd, seemingly minor moments. The book's title comes from the curses yelled by a man who was taking an "asshole stroll" across the road, ambling along with the speed of a diseased bovine, Gillespie notes, when she almost hit him because she wasn't paying attention. She suspects the neighborhood denizens will be unhappy that someone like her is looking for a house in the area: "[The crack dealers] shake their heads dejectedly, knowing it's a bad day for the neighborhood when bleachy-haired honky bitches can't brake to accommodate a good asshole stroll." Among these bright moments of detail, Gillespie manages to tell the story of her family, and like any family worth examining, it has an unusually large number of oddballs. Her mother, who wanted to become a cosmetologist but was terrible at it, ended up as a weapons designer after falling into a job at IBM. Her usually jobless father excelled at charming people into buying him drinks and wearing designer shoes. Sometimes tender, but mostly just wry and a bit wild, Gillespie's writing is like the best radio commentary, leaving fans hungry for more. Photos.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

A publicist attached the word memoir to this book by the NPR commentator and Creative Loafing columnist, but lacking much of a through line (and with a lot of repeated information), it reads more like a collection of commentary and columns. Gillespie dealt with a difficult, itinerant childhood by settling in Atlanta, forming a new family of offbeat friends, and working toward home ownership. Irreverent and earthy, sometimes fairly funny, most of these microessays follow a similar formula. She free-associates between past and present, ruminating on self, friendship, and family, bundling it all into a life-affirming epiphany (let go of needless attachments, live in the moment, don't live in fear) within a couple of pages. Some are quite successful, although the book isn't entirely compelling as a front-to-back read: each piece is so short that it feels like being stuck in stop-and-go traffic. Curiously, the bad neighborhood of the title is discussed only at the very end, and Gillespie's reflections on moving to a poverty-stricken area are pretty thin. Keir Graff
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks (June 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060561998
• ISBN-13: 978-0060561994
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,106,313 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bleached Blonde White Woman Runs Riot, April 7, 2004

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prisrob "pris," (New England USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood (Hardcover)

We all know someone like the author, Hollis Gillespie. Outrageous, hilarious, living life to the fullest, ignorant of house cleaning behaviours, and more to the point someone who would be such a good friend! Hollis has depicted her life in a series of vignettes searching for a home to buy in Atlanta.
Hollis found the title of her book one day when she was driving, and almost ran over a man she didn't see. He yelled at her "You Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch!" *%$*%$ etc., and Hollis realized she had found the title of her book.

Hollis tells us of her life with her parents- a father who is an alcoholic and unable to maintain a steady job. Her mother,who had wanted to become a beautician, but became a weapons designer instead. Hollis, her brother and two sisters moved with her parents from job to job all over the country. It is in this manner that Hollis developed her pysche or what she calls one. She is a little off-center, a little too cute at times.

Hollis believes that one must live their life to the fullest- why go half-way, push the throttle. And that is exactly what she does. She moves to Greece to become a serious writer and has more funny and interesting experiences because she is so open to them. She used to love to drink and take a few drugs and to go to carnivals, and she did this with her friends. Daniel, Grant and Lary are a big part of this book- many of the subtle and not so subtle yarns are about these three men. Hollis is most herself it seems when she is using four letter words, and this may be off-putting if you don't understand the context.

Each autobiographical tale that composes this book does not seem to follow any order- unless random order is what you are seeking. Hollis is a regular commentator on NPR's "All Things Considered" and writes a column called "Mood Swing" in an Atlanta alternative weekly. Hollis writes well, and if the articles in this book followed some sort of series I would have found it more put together. As is, the book is well done and we understand a little better how Hollis has become the original she is. Highly recommended. prisrob

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars She Frolicks In The Ottomiss.", April 4, 2004

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H. F. Corbin "Foster Corbin" (ATLANTA, GA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood (Hardcover)

A friend of mine and fan of the author calls her the "potty-mouth of Creative Loafing", a title I suspect that would not displease her since her language is saltier than the peanuts her father ate to disguise his alcoholic's breath. In this loosely-connected string of essays-- Ms. Gillespie finally moves into her home in Capitol View in Atlanta and several of the essays lead up to that move-- she will make you laugh with her raucous humor, marvel at her uncanny ability to coin new phrases (housework impaired,for instance) and identify with the universality of her sense of loss and sorrow. While the essays are chockfull of sailor vocabulary, many of them end in sorrow for lost oportunities. Ms. Gillespie's alcoholic father died alone and she blew a chance to be with him, for example. And she could have been kinder to him by pretending to like the cooking he did for her and her brother and sisters: "Looking back, I wish we could have pretended we liked some of his meals, but when you're young your weapon is honesty, which is perhaps the most merciless of them all." I would have liked to have known her parents, particularly her mother, an atheist who built bombs for the government, but who, on her deathbed, said that her greatest regret in life was asking for a bicycle for Christmas as a little girl, knowing full well that her parents could not afford to buy her one. Gillespie has aptly named this chapter about her mother, "Jesus Loves Atheists." There are many other essays like this here that will warm your heart.

As I "frolicked through the ottomiss" of these essays--Gillespie's childhood misunderstanding of the words of "Puff, the Magic Dragon"-- two thoughts kept popping up in my brain: (1) which of these essays does Ms. Gillespie select to read aloud at signings and (2) that her parents would be proud of her if they could read this book.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Quick Sketch Artist, July 16, 2005

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takingadayoff "takingadayoff" (Las Vegas, Nevada) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: Bleachy-Haired Honky Bitch: Tales from a Bad Neighborhood (Paperback)

I read this book for all the wrong reasons, and you probably will, too. The cover is colorful and cheerful. There are photos of the author, Hollis Gillespie, making silly faces on many of the pages. The reviews compare Gillespie to Erma Bombeck. The author bio says she is a flight attendant and language specialist, jobs that lend themselves to comedy routines. In short, this looked like a quick, funny book.

Gillespie is no Erma Bombeck. I like Erma Bombeck, but Gillespie is better.

When Gillespie wants to be funny, she can leave you hiccuping with laughter. Her chapter on a trip to X-rated Amsterdam with her family and another on her adventures as a bad translator are priceless.

But most of the time, Gillespie is talking about her offbeat friends and downscale neighborhood, or about her unconventional childhood and her, um, eccentric parents. If she were inclined to dwell on how she was denied a normal childhood (whatever that is) and blame her parents for their faults, she would have plenty of ammunition. Instead, she refuses to be the victim. She looks back on the mistakes her parents made and seems to understand.

The essays in BHHB are very short, most are only two pages. What Gillespie manages to pack into these short pieces is amazing. Gillespie is like one of those artists who paints a few strokes and you think, well, that wasn't much, but then you realize how much those few strokes reveal. The genius is in knowing when to quit and to let the viewer, or reader, fill in the blanks.

So if the kicky title, the irreverent design, the promise of a laugh riot pull you into reading this, fine. You will not be disappointed. And you'll get a lot more besides.