Customer Reviews

Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated

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As with many, I went through the list of 'Prairie' books as they were released. As a reader, I do not necessarily look to 'relate' to the author's life, because we are all clearly different, even though I have spent my life in the entertainment business and my work is still in it. What I do look for is the author's honesty in the details they do choose to share. I also like it if the author realizes that not all their readers have shared in their experiences. It is almost like wanting my doctor to talk to me in terms I can understand and relate, rather than in medical jargon. And even me having been in the business for most of my life, I can still read an actor's autobiography and go: "What in the world is he or she talking about?!"

First came Gilbert's 'Prairie Tale.' I liked the book, but the author failed to realize that her readers are, for the most part, completely removed from her reality. She relates to the reader as a 'peer,' failing to realize that they will mostly have little clue as to what it is like to be in her shoes (i.e. not everyone can run up to Montreal to find out what their boyfriends are up to). Many readers will also like to know what was it like 'being' in the Little House ambience. Gilbert goes through her Little House years rather fast, so if you blink, you may miss it. This is understandable, because she grew up there, so it became, for her, daily routine, but her audience may be wanting a bit more since this was not their routine, and may be hungry to know more. And it seemed that her book was more a therapeutic catharsis rather than sharing one on one with her readers. Again, understandably so, and the approach she chose, so I took it as that and went with it.

Then came Melissa Sue Anderson's book, which in my view was pretty much a waste of paper. She remains as aloof in her accounts as she was with her co-stars in her years working in 'Little House.' What Arngrim would later explain about Anderson in her own book is clearly what I perceived about her reading it. Cold, removed and basically "I am not going to tell you much about me, so do not bother me by asking."

Finally, after much waiting, came Alison's book. Since what I knew of her was that she was witty, honest, open and just totally delightful, I could not wait to read her accounts. Yes, unlike some people, I do not hold the actor accountable for what their character does! As soon as the book arrived, I started glancing through it and immediately realized this was going to be an even better ride than I expected! Having finished the book, I have to say that it was even more so. I did not want it to end! She is charming, funny and completely open. She holds little back. But what I liked most is that she talks to her readers not only as 'friends,' but also knowing that their experience is not like hers. Therefore, she makes it clear to understand and relate to. In doing this, the gap that could be there between her and her readers is eliminated and she comes across as a person, rather than a celebrity many cannot relate to. Now, Alison could have easily followed in Melissa Gilbert's path, since both her and Melissa G. were pretty much raised in the business, making it hard to see life from the outside, but she did not. This is an enormous credit to her, because it is not easy to do. What this means to me is that she can relate to the business 'outsiders' as with the 'insiders' and does not talk down to, but on equal terms. Clearly, she not only appreciates her fans, but also completely understands their curiosity and aims at placating it. To someone in the business, it becomes pretty much run of the mill what a set looks like, what the crew does and what others in the cast are like. They tend to disregard that fans may be craving to know every detail, because to the actor, it is a daily reality they have stopped being in awe of. Alison seems to understand this and speaks to her readers with the same awe they have. Her attitude is pretty much, "you and I are not much different, let me share about my life with you and how wonderful my Little House 'behind the scenes' years were." Alison also shares about her own child abuse, and does so handling a very delicate subject in quite a remarkable way. She is indeed quite a woman.

I have to add this as well: Alison's wit is phenomenal! There are times in reading her book in which she has you laughing so hard you literally start crying. Her matter of fact look at life in Hollywood, Simi Valley and the 1800's prairie is just hilarious.

If you are even a remotely interested fan of 'Little House on the Prairie,' you HAVE to get this book!

As a girl who grew up with Little House on the Prairie, I knew that I would enjoy this book. A Nellie Oleson tell all? I mean, who WOULDN'T want to read that!? And as a behind the scene look at the world of Little House, Prairie Bitch is detailed and funny, with wonderful descriptions of her costars. What I didn't realize when I pre-ordered it was Alison's work for survivors of sexual assault and her background as an assault survivor, along with the work she's done for years in support of people living with AIDS. She took what could have just been a breezy and funny childstar memoir and gave it deep substance and importance.

I recently saw Alison's stand up show and enjoyed it so much I decided to get her book. I honestly cannot put it down. She writes with such wit and humor. I hope she comes to Orange County California so I can have her sign my copy! It is great to hear about her advocacy efforts when it comes to protecting children and also for her work with AIDS related matters. Bravo Alison for all you do and for a truly great book.

While I watched Little House a few times as a kid, I didn't become a big fan until recently when I re-read the books from childhood and bought the boxed set when it was on sale at B&N. As a child, Nellie scared the daylights out of me - mostly because I was bullied a lot in school and she reminded me of those mean girls. As an adult, I kind of loved her brazen bitchy style. While she was annoying, she was pretty damn smart. I did like how she grew up though and was sad to see her leave the show (but was thrilled when she came back for visits).

Since I read "Prairie Tale" Amazon suggested that I may want to preorder Confessions of a Prairie Bitch... and I did, immediately. It sounded like a much more enjoyable read than the former book. While I liked Prairie Tale okay I didn't relate much to Melissa at all. I didn't grow up rich. I didn't have a seemingly great family. I didn't drink until I was 21. I never rebelled. So while her story was interesting to me, I couldn't really relate. It was also told in more of a dramatic sad fashion, than in the dark-humor fashion that I greatly prefer and understand.

I got Confessions the day it was release and it killed me to have to finish my book I was reading before I could delve into it (I'm anal like that). I kept looking at the cover just KNOWING a great story lied beneath it's pink pop art cover. While you can't always judge a book by its cover, this one is exactly what its cover depicts - sassy, spunky, edgy and hilarious.

While I didn't have a gay father, I had a similar abusive relationship with my older brother so from the early stages of this book I felt like Alison was a kindred spirit. It's rare to meet someone that has and appreciates dark humor and isn't weirded out by it. I'm also a Daddy's girl and am proud to this day when people tell me that I remind them of him in looks and wit. While I was never an actor (well unless you count the local theater!) I could really relate to a lot of Alison's stories and life. Even if I couldn't, I know that I would still enjoy this book so much more than the other prairie tales because it plays it real.

If you are looking for a backstory on some of the antics on the Little House set they are here in abundance. Alison tells the truth about everything and doesn't sugar coat a thing, including just what was beneath Charles' trousers and what Melissa Sue was really like. If you are just looking for a fun memoir to read, look no further. This book is a great read, even for the non-LHOP fan!

Beyond Little House, Alison delves into what became her life's work afterwards beyond her stand-up routine, her fight for AIDS rights and for [...]. I honestly had no idea such a law existed to protect relatives of abuse victims and am aghast that such a law even EXISTS in this time and day! I plan on signing up immediately and I hope that you do as well (especially after reading her novel).

The bottom line is that it's easy to take a life of sadness and heartache and turn it into a lifelong sorrow. I hear all too often "woe is me" and "life isn't fair" and yet most of these people complaining don't even know what unfair or true sadness is. The beauty of this book is that never once does Alison wax poetic about the crappy hand life dealt her, she chucks it up to a life lesson and something to grow from and moves along. Alison's wit and candor may not be your cup of tea, but you have to admit to admiring her brass set of balls and her positive outlook on life.

By far the best book I've read this year and one of the best memoirs ever. I hope to read more from Alison and that she makes a stop somewhere near the lonely state of Ohio on her tour!!

Contrary to most fans, I was not really a fan of Little House on the Prairie. The sole reason I watched the show was for Nellie Oleson. I remember in the 70's, before I even turned 10 years old, my sister and I would sit in front of the TV asking; "Where's Nellie?!" We always knew when Nellie was on screen, we would be guaranteed a sadistic uproarious laugh. I never hated Nellie, but loved her for the villain that she was, even then.

In the 90's, I began to catch reruns of Little House, and was reminded at the brilliance that is Nellie; her looks, her dialog delivery, her vicious little smile..., then it all made sense to me. I was now able to view Nellie's antics as the undeniable camp that they were, and my love for this character in the 70's was apparently the first hint that I was a budding little gay boy. I have no idea why the idea of a vicious little girl, (The Bad Seed, anyone?) appeals so much to gay men, but it does. I think it may have to do with the cartoonish over-the-top situations they are usually depicted in. And let's face it, Nellie Oleson was often wonderfully over the top.
I found myself recording these reruns, copying only the Nellie bits for future viewing pleasure. I'm now tempted to buy the whole series because there are many other Nellie bits that I've probably not seen since the original broadcast.

I'm not a very spiritual person, though I do sometimes find that I am drawn to specific people, musical artists or movies, even before knowing much about them. One of the first things I did when I got online in the mid-90's was look up Alison Arngrim and any information I could find about her. I was able to read various interviews and Q&As which proved that not only was Nellie Oleson a brilliantly acted character, but Alison Arngrim was also a very funny, witty, strong, caring and brilliant woman. She was not dull or bland, with her depiction of Nellie just being a fluke. She was a hilarious and fascinating person. I've adored Alison as much more than Nellie ever since.

A couple of months ago, I got a phone call from a friend of mine in another state. He casually mentioned the upcoming release of Alison's book, assuming I must already be aware of it. I had no idea what he was talking about, and promptly came to Amazon to see if my friend was just playing the cruelest of jokes on me. But there it was in all its glory - Confessions of a Prairie Bitch. I thought I was dreaming by the look of that hilariously perfect cover, and the amusing title. I honestly think I may have had a tear in my eye. Oh, no! The book was still a couple of months from release! I found myself returning to this Amazon listing a couple of times a week, giddily anxious like a kid at Christmas time in anticipation for the big day.

I received my copy of the book last week, and it has been everything I expected, and more. I had no doubt that a book recalling Alison's life would be a fascinating and insightful read, and the humor I had come to expect was all over it. It was informative, hilarious, revealing, and even sad at times, but always up front, frank and real. I love people who are truly authentic, and Alison is all of that. Having written and released my own memoirs a few years ago, (though mine is more focused on a specific time frame and subject matter), I know how therapeutic and purging compiling something like this in print can be. But what an adventure she has been on.

I love Nellie Oleson for the brilliantly campy villain that she was, and no one could have brought her to life the way Alison did. I adore Alison for being the funny, strong and wonderful woman she is. I would love her to stop by the Cleveland area some time with her show and for a book signing. I wish Alison all the luck in the world in her life and with her book, and hope the steady stream of well deserved 5 star reviews continue to add up. You deserve every one of them!

I didn't love and adore the Little House on the Prairie television show and I always found the character of Nellie Oleson annoying. However, I thoroughly enjoyed Alison's memoir. It was a quick, easy, entertaining read. Alison is refreshingly honest and forthright. Born into an eccentric family of actors, her upbringing was unconventional and tragic. Abused at the hand of her brother and often ignored by her parents, Alison managed to overcome it all, with her humor intact.

The book contains a fair amount of profanity and while I hate vulgarity and find it unnecessary, it wasn't gratuitous. Although it will keep me from giving the book the 4 stars I'd like to give it. The narration is smooth and you can almost imagine yourself sitting next to Alison as she talks about her experiences. Given her personality, I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but this wasn't some salacious or haughty tell all book. While we get a lot of behind the scene experiences and quite a bit of dishing, we also get Alison's honest commentary and observations.

Where Melissa Gilbert wanted to shatter people's perceptions of herself in her memoir, Alison Arngrim simply brings us into her world to discover who she really is. Her life was touched by abuse and AIDS and I appreciate how she used her celebrity to help others and bring attention to these issues.

A shame my mother could not live to see this day for she would be so happy and it's all thanks to Nellie Oleson: it took me 44 years to fall in love with a woman but I finally managed. You come to this book knowing that Alison played Nellie Oleson and perhaps knowing that she's still friends with Melissa Gilbert and had a stand-up act, and maybe even you knew about the sexual abuse from the Larry King interview years ago (did anybody else want to go Preston Brooks on that old man when he kept asking things like "was there penetration?" and "who was it?" after she said- repeatedly- she didn't want to answer them? Even if it was just me then I feel no less justified.). By the time you read the book you leave wishing she was on your speed dial.
What puts this miles ahead of other memoirs- and not just by celebrities- is that she not only has a great story- carbuncles of them in fact, and you feel she's only raised the first couple of petticoats- but she tells them FABULOUSLY. This isn't just a great child star memoir, it's a great book and I hope it's not her last because the lady has talent. If she were just hysterically funny, or just gave the perfect amount of dish about her co-stars, it would be worth the price in and of itself, but the fact she can drop bombshells that make you gasp and anecdotes that make you laugh so loud you scare your dogs all on the same page. From her parents- so genteely dysfunctional and flamboyant that you wonder how in the world she missed being southern- to the sexual abuse she endured from her brother and not only so bravely shares but does so in such a matter-of-fact way that it is all the more horrifying, to the beloved friend and ersatz husband who battled AIDS when only one funeral home in L.A. would take his body, to her celebrity dish and her experiences around the world as the greatest ringleted petticoated she-devil in celluloid history (Nellie of course hovers over her life like a 7 year DVD set of Dorian Gray), and yet you not only read not a single note of self pity but have the feeling that to pity her would bring Nellie raging to the surface faster than a wheelchair down a hill- she is not just writing a biography of herself but bringing a degree of immortality to characters who need to be remembered. This book does not go in my mental classification system with the memoirs of her LHOP co-stars and other child stars, it gets filed in with David Sedaris and Jeanette Walls and other fantastic Gen-X memoirists.
A look at my other reviews will show you that I am not a person of few words, and it is a tribute to Alison that I end this here, because I don't want to spoil the delight of this book for you. Buy two copies- one to keep and one to loan, because you'll want to share it but you won't want to lose your own.

This was the third attempt for me to return to the the vintage "Little House on the Prairie". The first was by Half-Pint herself, in Prairie Tale: A Memoir. Her Little House days are recounted but by far, the majority of the tome is dedicated to her pill-popping and wild Hollywood life after the show. Then came the truly hideous The Way I See It: A Look Back at My Life on Little House which half the book is merely episode recaps (really). So, I hoped upon hope that my third attempt to visit Walnut Grove in a book would be beneficial. Thankfully, the bully of the prairie has come through, and has given us a remarkable memoir in "Confessions of a Prairie Bitch: How I Survived Nellie Oleson and Learned to Love Being Hated".

Alison's memoir is a doozy. First, you get an inside glimpse into the making of the show, starting with a blow-by-blow account of how she got the role that would define her as an actress, the incomparable Nellie Oleson. One of the most surprisingly delightful recounts are the hours she spent in the hair and makeup rooms donning that truly hideous Nellie wig. Her insights into her costars are witty, slightly sarcastic, and eye-opening. Her friendship with Melissa Gilbert really make the chapters fun and she reserves some venom for Melissa Sue Anderson, who played Mary. There is plenty of dish on the people in the show, all in good fun and none of it comes across as nasty.

Another wonderfully touching part of her book is her recounting of her on screen husband, actor Steve Tracy, who was gay in real life. Their friendship, and his fight with AIDS, ended up changing her life. She writes with real compassion and insight; those pages are particularly beautiful and heartbreaking.

But what will really knock your socks off with this book is her revelation of her years of sexual abuse by her older brother, which she had to endure for years. She writes about how she used the nastiness of Nellie to work through some of her issues, almost as if being nasty to others was her way of defending herself. This issue too would come to define her adult life and mission as she works on these issues.

One year, I remember standing in Los Angeles watching the Pride parade, and seeing Alison ride down in a car waving to all of her fans. I fell in love with her then. Now, after reading this maginficant memoir, she has my respect and admiration for the rest of my life. She is a survivor, so should we all be.

This popped up on on a 'new memoir and biography' list, and I admit I wasn't very interested until I saw the reviews. 40 total, 39 of them 5-star? I was not a huge fan of the show but downloaded the sample and took it to the pool. 15 minutes later I downloaded the rest and read the whole thing that day. My poor husband, trying to doze in the sun, kept hearing: "Her mother was Gumby! Her dad was Liberace's manager! She says if you walked in to an audition you might as well hang it up if Jodie Foster was there!" And re the "Little House" years: there's some fun dishing, but there's also an interesting perspective on the on-set environment, positive engagement with the adult actors, and Michael Landon's role as paternalistic producer/director: I never really thought about the fact that -- unlike the kids associated with most other '70s TV shows -- the 'Little House' kids all grew up ok, with no arrests, no ODs.

The book is really interesting and very entertaining. Argrim is quite funny, good with pacing, and handles her report of childhood trauma very well. She also seems to live in the real world, where people actually have to earn and live on reasonable sums of money, and she has dedicated lots of time and energy to work on behalf of AIDS patients and abused children. This book is (so far) my biggest pleasant reading surprise of 2010.

Having read and liked Melissa (Sue) Anderson's staid yet interesting account of her time on the 'Prairie', I surmised that Alison Arngrims's take on the iconic tv series would run along the same lines. Right....and wrong. I'd have to classify this book as a true memoir with a lot of recollections about Little House On The Prairie thrown in.
Anderson's book is seemingly benign. It's factual, but really never gets very personal and you get very much the idea that it represented a job to Anderson. Arngrim's version covers a lot of ground, gets very personal at times, and while by no means is bitchy, often cuts to the point. Virtually everything that Arngrim expresses is told with humor, even the most painful of issues. It's difficult for me to express, but I found it easier to read this book because Arngrim is comedically caustic and sarcastic (even at her own expense) and almost everything is approached with humor even while she relates some fairly unsettling stuff. I think the humor expressed blunts some of the very personal things she details which would be upsetting to a certain number of her readers.
In the first couple of pages of the book, you are told that her father is gay and this is no big thing in the Arngrim house but it is never addressed and Alison (a very aware kid) keeps waiting for the ball to drop and have one of her parents come clean. It isn't until she approaches her mom about it many years later that her mom explains their reasoning. Her parents were both show business people. Her dad was an actor turned agent and her mom was an actress who was a popular voice artist. Her six years older brother Stefan was a child actor. His career dried up as he matured too quickly. Allison is world wise beyond her years and gets into acting early as a means to get independence.
Life 'on the prairie' is for the most part a good experience and is sort of a cross between family and the army. While the kids are like soldiers who are expected to perform and follow strict orders, there is also a lot of fun on this 'classless' tv set where there is a lot of camaraderie. As a production set, certain aspects are atypical. There are no fancy dressing rooms or trailers. She likes the majority of cast members and crew and has an easy rapport with them. She forges close personal relationships with Melissa Gilbert and the actor who is brought in to play her love interest, Steve Tracy. She makes some interesting comments about Michael Landon and relates a lot of stories occuring on and off the set.
Her home life is less stable. The Arngrims standard of living fluctuates with their income. They move quite a bit. Sometimes commodities such as food are in short supply. Her parents often seem oblivious to her needs and they are unaware that her brother has been molesting her both physically and sexually for years. The brother also has a fondness for alcohol and drugs and that later plays a part in her life.
Arngrim eventually decides to leave the program, but does come back for one final appearance. She developes her talent for comedy into a stand-up career that still flourishes and finds that people still love the girl who was so easy to hate. Her deep friendship with Steve Tracy (who died of AIDS) directs her to be an advocate for the gay community and she also lobbies for sharper laws for those who perpetrate acts of incest against family members.
Aside from weaving a very interesting tale, Arngrim has this oddball charm that belies the fact that she was no Nellie Olesen in real life and that is what really has won me over and makes this book a winner in my mind.