From Publishers Weekly
Woods, a 30-something sex columnist for Esquire and former correspondent for The Daily Show, has always yearned to be a celebrity: I've never known what it's like not to want to be famous. Her rambling autobiography starts with a California childhood filled with acting classes and ends with a minor role in the 1990s on 7th Heaven. En route, her stream-of-consciousness memoir is filled with descriptions of adolescent girlfriends and crushes on rock stars. Yet her brief flirtation with fame—as a booker for Johnny Depp's Viper Room—receives a scant six pages and results in a drug-fueled craving for Twinkies. After slogging through three-quarters of the book, Woods finally reveals a mildly interesting experience on The Daily Show in 1999. But it's scant payoff. The only semipoignant note comes when she stares at photos and is saddened to discover how time and drugs have ravaged her. Unfortunately, a tiresome description of her dreams on Ambien interrupts this potentially well-structured essay. Fans of her witty Esquire column will be disappointed by this tedious and self-indulgent collection. (July)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Readers in the same age bracket as 35-year-old Esquire sex columnist Grenrock Woods are most likely to enjoy this mildly amusing memoir about growing up in Southern California's San Fernando Valley. The author's life on the Left Coast is an open book in which colorful characters abound, from stern grade-school teachers in shapeless dresses (the essence of 1970s chic) to lumbering playground bullies who made young Stacey's daily lunch period a living hell. Among the most memorable: the administrator of the local modeling and performing-arts academy who claims a onetime friendship with Joan Crawford and dispenses such pithy career tips as "only part your hair in the middle if you have a turned-up nose." Grenrock Woods' chronological account of her myriad jobs is tedious at times; her descriptions of gigs as a correspondent for The Daily Show are often mean-spirited (or just plain mean). Her cultural references, however, are dead-on, from Magnum P.I. to Rick Springfield. Novelist and Emmy-winner Merrill Markoe writes with far more wit and panache about L.A., but Grenrock Woods makes an acceptable alternative. Block, Allison
