Customer Reviews

The Year of Yes

5 star:		(34)
4 star:		(17)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(20)

 

 

This is a book written by a woman who was tired of her dating scene and decided she needed to date with an open mind, so she spent one year saying yest to litteraly everyone who asked her out. There was 150 dates including a homeless man, a couple of non english speakers, 10 taxi drivers, a mime and even two lesbians. There was a guy she knew from school who was now a boxer and asked her to meet him at a strip club (one of the bad dates), a Frenchman who was a software millionare yet lived with his mother and he wanted to introduce her to god (turned out to be his private parts), a 70 year old and on and on it goes.
In the end, Maria learns that perfect doesn't exist and perfect isn't the point. Love can come in the most surprising packages and you have to appreciate that love is many things including hard work.
All has ended well for this adventureous girl, who subsequently met the man she's now married to, at the Kennedy Center and is very happy with him (despite a 25year age difference) and his two children from a previous marriage.
This is a very entertaining read and even through her recounts, it's an eye and mind opener for sure.

Maria Dahvana Headley's memoir is a bit different than books I typically choose to read, but I'm glad I read it. The premise is simple: she, dissatisfied with her love life, decides to say "yes" to everyone who asks her out--for a year. Had I written this book about a year of my college experience, it would have been a very short book, but I digress... The strengths of this book are some of her hilarious descriptions of her predicaments-- particularly the part involving Ira the shrieking dachsund, and her fleeting, troubling stories about her mentally ill father. The weaknesses of the book are that she keeps trying to get the reader to believe that she is a fat, ugly, dork. This is clearly is not the case, evidenced by her picture accompanying the author bio and the staggering number of people who hit on her and tell her that she is sexy and beautiful. Also, she makes frequent, somewhat pretentious references to scads of classical and hip lit, which I suspect are lost on many of her readers. Heck, I'm an English teacher, and I haven't read *all* that stuff! All in all, it's a very entertaining book that I started and finished within the same weekend, and it makes the reader aware of the importance of making connections with people every day-- even people who make you wanna say "no".

I wanted to like this book - really, I did. I loved the idea of saying "yes" to everyone who asks you out with the idea that inital impressions are not always the best way to make dating decisions. However, this book was so full of pretentious literary references and narcissistic ramblings that I couldn't make it past the second chapter. The author seemed to want the reader to understand that she is extremely well read. Nothing wrong with that, except she couldn't manage to contain her glee with how intelligent she was that some of her stories were complete non sequitors. For instance, there was a part in the book where she discussed how, as a child, she read every book in the entire library in alphabetical order all the way up to "m" (I think). Great, but what does that have to do with your present dating situation? I just couldn't take it after awhile and had to stop reading. I guess my overall criticism is that this book is marketed as a fluffy, light read, which is what I expected but didn't get.

I agree with an earlier poster - the author seemed very proud of how well read she is. Half the time, I had no idea what the heck she was referring to, or what it had to do with dating.

When I initially heard of the book, I thought it was a great premise. For some reason, I had assumed that the author was older during her experiment, because (in my opinion) a 20-year-old in college sleeping around for a year and experimenting with dating (including women) is normal. In fact, it's quite cliche'.

"The Year of Yes" sounds fascinating in premise, but fails to live up to the expectations. I assumed from reviews that it was semi-journalism/semi-memoir when Maria Headley undertook her "Year of Yes" but it is a dopey recounting of a year from college.

Some things that were annoying:

The intro, where she stated she changed people to make them sound "wittier than they actually are" - um. How, Maria? This book wasn't remotely funny. Her dates were glided over, or lumped together, exchanging potentially interesting details for page after page of dull self-analysis.

I was hoping for David Sedaris / super-sensory / laugh-out-loud tales... which everyone has had a bad date... just page-after-page. Or even something sad or scary.. or touching whatsoever. But alas, it was like reading a college kid's blog, "Oh Vic is pissed at me b/c she thinks I'm a slut. Whatever. This guy is totally hot, but he keeps quoting Shakespeare thinking I'll be impressed"...

And Maria kept name-dropping her favorite authors! Her ego blares through, as though she thinks her writing is anywhere close to theirs.

And there wasn't a hint of adult seriousness to her Year of Yes "project" or whatever it was supposed to be.

So, in summation: Not funny. At all. Narcissistic. Unnecessarily. Not what it claims to be. Unfortunately. Oh well.

I read a review of this book several months ago and was so excited about the premise. I just knew this would be the prefect read during my Christmas vacation -- something all us single girls could relate to and have a good laugh. How disappointing......I couldn't even finish reading the book. (For the record, I can not even remember the last time I didn't finish reading a book.) I tried skipping the paragraphs that seemed so disconnected, but ultimately just gave up. If you still feel the need to read this book, visit your local library before spending your hard earned cash.

The Year of Yes is funny, often hilariously so. It's also smart, and if at all self-consciously smart (of all the loves people mention about the book, the author is, first and foremost, a bibliophile), I don't feel it's self-aggrandizing, but ultimately intentionally self-skewering. There's been much criticism of the author's use of literary allusion and name dropping. It seems to me that this is far from an exercise in intellectual one-ups-womanship, rather an attempt to show that the romantic idealism gleaned from "high literature" may equip us for day-to-day human interaction no better than the acknowledged fairy tales we readily equate with fantasy. Not to mention the humorous tension between the expectations the author has for her life in NY versus-well I won't spoil it, but the term "lean-to" comes to mind. The Year of Yes is full of such deflations, and I believe the author readily laughs at herself throughout the memoir. It is this real willingness to be the [...] of her own joke that gives the book its warmth and kept me engaged. I look forward to her next book.

One of the most dangerous traits of someone with a way with words is the ability they have of facile persuasion. The reader (or listener) becomes entranced from the way the message is told, without listening to what message is actually being said.

There is no question whatsoever that the author, a playwright, has a gift with words. She writes extremely well.

But the story told is, when reduced to its essences, the story of a woman who finds fault with suitor after suitor, only to find her future spouse -- a man who she knew prior to the "Year of Yes" -- faultless upon their encounter. Perhaps it's too much to ask from a woman priding herself on her New York toughness, but throughout the book, the "freakish" qualities of each dalliance are brought to the forefront, with little thought to uniqueness or the actual personhood of each of those men beneath the caricature she draws for us. Remember, a caricature is a quick sketch in which the most prominent attributes of someone are highlighted and exaggerated even beyond their reality for the sake of humor. This is, spot on, precisely the definition of what the author paints for her readers of each of these men and women from her "Year of Yes."

When she meets her future husband -- again, I reemphasize, a man who she knew prior to the Year of Yes, strongly suggesting to this reader that none of her suitors were ever in the running for anything more than a coolly-made valuation for what visceral experience they could lend to her life -- she sees no flaws in him. Were he to have ended up not being her husband but merely one of the other myriad of men she marched through her life, we no doubt would have instead seen such qualities as his crying and the (technical) infidelity, or some other attribute that wives and husbands easily overlook in the course of their love. (Or were the Actor to have ended up being her husband, the version of their romance we were told would have been far more idyllic.)

Do I sound angry? It is, perhaps, because the quality of compassion means a great deal to me.

Throughout the book, as she is a good author, I had been empathizing with her struggles throughout her Year of Yes. Once I began to conclude the book's final chapter, however, it was a bit of a shock for me to realize at the end that the tales of the heart which we had been told were, in fact, spoken from someone who, throughout the book, had in fact been quite heartless until her long-desired love finally came to her.

I know the spiel about the Year of Yes, that it's about NYU student Maria Headley dating people she might not otherwise. But the sections about her family and particularly her father were a shift in tone. They make me want to hear more about how this woman came to be so self-possessed. A girl growing up outside Boise who read as much as Headley obviously has and takes herself off to NYC with such confidence . . . that's a woman I want to read more from.

Very entertaining, very smart fun and well, I know Maria, and only she could pull this off. I started it on a Friday night with a bottle of wine, and was finished by Saturday morning (with the wine and the book) - no reason to put either down! Can't wait for the movie.