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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
This Week I Read a Really Fun Book..., June 21, 2006
Ahead of the trend...Brewer's "stream of conciousness" style brings to mind the current focus on opinion style books. Much in the vein of Terri Hatcher's "Burnt Toast" and the like.
This woman's down-to-earth, unjaded look at her world and the world around her is endearing. Dottie's writing style is like dishing with your best girlfriend...she will make you cry and leave you laughing.
Brewer's story is the story of everywoman growing up today, learning as she goes and faced with a comnpletely new set of options and obstacles from those that went before us. Dottie looks at each one and moves through them (from breast implants to abusive relationships), of course hindsite is 100%. Because this is written after-the-fact it allowed her to step back and take a more complete look at some situations...and probably was a little cathartic.
...and then there is that part about John Wayn Bobbitt, inquiring minds want to know!
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Beats a supermarket tabloid any day, December 14, 2005
A distinction should be made between the persona described in memoir and the author of that memoir. Although they may seem to be one and the same person, they are not, and here is why. A memoir or an autobiography is an attempt to put down in writing one's life and to do so in a more or less nonfictional way. However, in addition to the inevitable lapses in recollection, it is psychologically impossible to be objective about one's life. What we always have is an interpretation of a life. Not only that, but autobiographers always lie.
I know to some people that may seem a startling statement; nonetheless it is true. Sometimes they lie by omission, sometimes by coloration, sometimes inadvertently, and sometimes deliberately. Finally, it takes a writer of unusual skill to actually capture herself on paper.
Dottie Brewer is not without skill, and with a title like "This Week I Married John Wayne Bobbitt" one would expect a humorous book. There are some chuckles here, but most of them are unintentional, and I am afraid that the laugh is mostly on the lady herself, although I don't think she really minds. However if she had played this more deliberately for laughs, I think it would have been a better book.
But what Dottie Brewer is about in this pop culture, self-help/inspirational, New Age-ish memoir is a justification for the many ups and downs and misadventures of her life including the matrimonial ones. John Wayne Bobbitt, he of the missing...uh, anatomy, was husband number four for the energetic Ms. Brewer, and failure number four as well. One gets the sense that the star of this memoir is the kind of person who will try almost anything--at least once. But to her credit she is also the kind of person who senses when things are not working out and is able to move on. And move on she does, from husbands, from careers, and from friends. This book is her latest enterprise, it along with her optimistically named publishing company, "Billion $ Baby Publications."
She describes experiences and attempts to explain why they happened. Some of her interpretations left me a bit astonished, as when she "channeled" an "A" on an essay exam that she hadn't studied for, or when she gave her guardian angels credit for the fact that the driver's side was locked when some teenagers with knives approached her car. (The passenger's side was not.)
I have known a few people like the ever-ambitious Ms. Brewer. They tend toward the adventurous and the impulsive, their lives filled with both excessive triumphs and excessive disasters. But they always manage to land on their feet. For Dottie Brewer this cat-like ability apparently comes from those angels that look out for her and because of her communication with "the Masters of the Universe" along with imbibing ideas from the self-help literature of the popular culture--sprinkled liberally throughout the book, e.g., "things do not equal happiness"; "if it isn't easy, you aren't doing it right"; "knowledge equals power"; etc.
What she does very well here is make her life interesting to the reader by perhaps revealing more of herself than she realizes. Her prose is chatty and moves right along. I read the book in an hour or so and was not put off by some of the typos (she twice has "breath" when she means "breathe") or the sometimes ungrammatical constructions (for example, she apparently thinks the nominative "I" should follow the preposition "between") or confusing Plato with Socrates (p. 29). The fact that she is always able to find something positive, some lesson, some measure of growth from even the most disagreeable experience is also to her credit.
What she doesn't do so well is convince--this reader at least--that she has any kind of consistent understanding of who she is and how she should conduct her life. I got the sense that sometimes she just lived from day to day, and at other times she had delusive ideas about love and happiness causing her to pursue exactly the wrong sort of partner or friend.
Her misadventure with fidelity-challenged Mr. Bobbitt is a case in point. Nine years his senior, Brewer claims that she fell in love with his boyish charm. However in the aftermath of their relationship she notes that one of the things that she got from him was the title for this book! Yes, Brewer knows that the surest road to literary success is through celebrity. Book publishers are loath to take a chance on a new writer, but if the writer has built-in publicity, then a lot of the gamble is taken out of the publication. Here however, Brewer is doing her own publishing. I think she would have been better off with a professional editor and a mainstream publisher because she does have talent and a good narrative ability, and she writes about things that would interest a lot of like-minded readers.
Brewer does tell us about Mr. Bobbitt's anatomical problem and how it was fixed, and she tells us what it's like being with him in the Biblical sense. But she wisely saves all that until the last chapter, so as to better whet our appetite.
Bottom line: interesting and worth reading for sociologists and especially for the New Age supermarket tabloid crowd.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Aw, you peeked! Knew you would!, May 16, 2002
Yes, it's there, in all the gory details. Dottie does talk about her courtship, marriage and 'it.' So, if you're into the titillating details about Bobbitt's bobbing baby...and want to know what HE calls it - read on. But, there's a lot more to this book. Dottie talks about many of her life experiences, the lessons she's learned, the wisdom she's gained, her personal heroes and gurus. The index is actually suprisingly educational. So, while you may buy the book to satisfy your curiousity,
you may enjoy the rest of it more than you ever expect.
And you've got to love the name of Dottie's publishing company.
Billion $ Baby Publications ...
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