Customer Reviews

Spent: Memoirs of a Shopping Addict

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

Avis Cardella loves fashion. When she was very young, she fell in love with name brands, beautiful clothes, and magazines. She saw her mother as the epitome of grace and beauty and wanted to be like her. While Avis was in her early twenties and in a tumultuous marriage, her mother died. What follows Avis is her choices in seeking to fill the hole left behind.

This memoir is beautifully and honestly written. She makes no excuses and places no blame on others. She makes choices based on her need to anesthetize her feelings about her loss. She becomes involved with rich, powerful men and enters the world of freelance fashion writing, while climbing the ladder of the rich and famous, spending all she has and then more while she seeks to numb her grief.

The author carefully addresses her different relationships and how they each served a purpose. Her downward spiral takes a couple of decades and her uphill climb is a process.

As our country is pushed into recession, "Spent" is written in a timely manner. Although full of designers the average woman may have heard in passing but would not be able to identify, the reader can identify with loss and searching for healing.

I really enjoyed the book. The author has a unique voice and writes with feeling and reason. She is able to connect her ideas and experiences clearly and finds healing and change within herself. She admits to slipping along the way, but her strength to admit her own choices are to blame is empowering.

As of recent-when making any purchase, a little voice within asks, "Is this something I want? Or, is this something I need?" I attribute my new found mindfulness to Avis Cardella. I also found her journey compelling because it spoke about an uncomfortable truth so many of us are unwilling to face. How much of our purchases are really important or necessary? The deeper issues are why! Avis Cardella explains her WHY and the resolve it took to face the endless acquiring of things that we call addiction. Addiction comes in a variety of form and Cardella invites the reader along from a perspective that may leave us asking at our next purchase, "Do I really need this want?"

I could not put this book down!

A quick read and reminder for those who spend too much. Avis Cardella is very honest about her spending habits, credit problems and financial troubles that followed. She goes through the stimulus for why her spending addiction started, what happened with the shopping trips, and her relationships- especially with men. Through her memoir she reminds the reader to reflect on why they spend, if they want or need it, and how it will spiral out of control without restraint. It is not a "Shopaholic" series style book- it is much more serious and reflective than these purely fictional works but still well done overall.

Beyond the portrayal of an addiction, SPENT brilliantly captures the global shopping fever that swept cities and propelled the luxury industry into high gear. By depicting this story as one woman's battle with shopping, Cardella immerses the reader in a microcosm of guilt-ridden consumerism. Hers is a provocative tale that articulates the emptiness that so many recession-era consumers recently faced at the end of a race caught up in striving for "camera ready" perfection of image, body, home and lifestyle. Through the redemption of this one woman, the book brilliantly illuminates the new realities of a more tempered consumer mindset. Marketers and retailers would do well to understand the rollercoaster ride that many consumers have just come off of. Cardella positions it all with the clarity that only first-hand experience can bring.

I really liked this book. I think it let me live vicariously through the author as I read about her shopping trips and the items she bought and left me thinking that I would have liked that lifestyle. If only I could have afforded it. I thought the writing was really good and the author was very candid about her shopping, spending, and addiction. I can see how the addiction could start and build, as I have a slight book addiction. Yet it gives credence to the world of today and what fashion magazines and the media say that women should wear and look like. I highly recommend this book.

While reading Avis Cardella's spent: MEMOIRS of a SHOPPING ADDICT, I had many different feelings. When she talked about buying high heeled boots, putting one coat in a bag, and wearing another more expensive coat out of a boutique, I wanted to go shopping too. She did seem to be describing bliss. I thought, this is the life. When she plunged to the place where help was definitely needed, the place where she was totally out of control, I backed away. Even if my journey along with Avis Cardella was imaginary, I wanted to go no further. Finally, I could see that these confessions of a shopaholic were no different than the confessions of any abuser of a substance. Soon the story became one about riches to rags.

Avis Cardella is a woman who experiences the black emptiness at the bottom of a well. "So much about me was small, removed from myself, afraid, and alone. I was completely frightened of facing myself...." This is understandable. The death of Avis Cardella's mother was not easy. She was heartbroken. She did not know how to deal with the endless grief. Shopping seemed to be the answer. She knew the names of designers like I know how to say my alphabets. At times she spent hours just walking through stores. The glamor and beauty seemed to be soothing for a little while.

There is a Christmas story in the memoir. When Christmas comes, Avis has no money to buy Christmas presents. It seemed too shameful to go home without gifts. She did not want to talk about being broke during Christmas. She wanted to at least appear happy and independent. Who wants to be the spoiler of Christmas magic? The author decides to give magazine subscriptions to her father and brother. She gave each one a magazine. With the promise that the rest of the subscriptions would come through the mail. Those magazines never arrived because daughter and sister did not have the funds to pay for those subscriptions. I felt so sad for her.

The book is marvelously revealing. W hile readingI could feel Avis Cardella's honesty. She did not sugar coat the truth. I also liked the book because it made me realize a shopping addiction is not cute or funny. It is as painful as any other addiction. The book is more than poignant. It is worth the time of a woman reader or a man reader. It is an important look at the other side of loving to shop. Avis Cardella, [...]

It's great to see shopping addiction addressed in a serious and thoughtful manner. However, I have to admit that it was hard to feel sympathy for the writer because her lowest point didn't bring with it the kind of disasterous financial consequences I've seen others in the same situation encounter. Her life is a charmed one starting with the modeling gigs of her youth (however scant), her tremendous beauty, the access to enviable social circles, ease in forging a career path, a surplus of handsome, wealthy boyfriends, etc. It becomes a memoir that, well, luxuriates in luxury problems. The other problem is the quality of the writing. It's not captivating enough to make us want to slog through every overspending shopping trip.

But (and of course this is one of the book's main themes), a life of privilege-- the house in the Hamptons, the parties, the glowing skin, the eighty Cosabella thongs--happiness does not make, and her honest attempts to portray that deserves mention. And at least she doesn't fabricate situations for dramatic purposes. She simply tells her story, unusual in an age when memoirists all too often present fiction as fact. She also deserves praise for writing about shopping addiction in the first place, especially as the disorder is given little credence as a subject worthy of exploration. Is it because women are primarily the ones afflicted? Except for the occasional feature on Oprah, the culture marginalizes what it deems this and other "women's issues." By the end I did feel more sympathy than I was able to muster at the beginning; I just wish the writing itself had been more compelling. I was left feeling like I'd read a conversational magazine article more interested in presenting information than captivating readers with an original voice.

An excellent, 'must read' book; focusing as it does on both social milieu and inner causal factors, it moves the flashlight focus, accurately unto: "An Examined Life", introspection and reflection. Recommended for both people exepriencing addictive impulses as well as the mental health professionals who work with them. I h ave, and will continue to, highly recommended this book.

If you're struggling with a shopping addiction, you will face yourself on these pages. For everyone else, this book isn't particularly special or a must read. The author's self destructiveness and lack of control is maddening, but those are the qualities that define her addiction. If you do not have a particular interest in the author, shopping addiction, or "an addict recovers" literature, you should read something else.

I'm looking for anything on this subject matter and liked this book. Also, one of the blogs that has intrigued me is reformedshopaholic.com. If you are interested in the shopping addiction or becoming a reformed shopaholic you probably need to read about many addicts to give you some motivation because it is damn near impossible to get over this addiction, so repetition is good. It's also not as productive to read about someone with a different lifestyle than yourself so you think you are not like them and therefor do not have the same addiction. "Spent" had to do with a person living a somewhat charmed life, which might make her story harder to relate to. It's hard to find a writer on this topic where you can really get inside their head.