BlogHer Book Club review - You Have No Idea

You know those celebrity tell all books that are so insulting to actual writers who have been trying for years to get a book published while raising two children and copy editing for money and trying to write a second book so that they can start the whole soul crushing experience of trying to get it published?

Well, I read one of them.

Vanessa Williams and her mother, Helen Williams, wrote a book about her life called, You Have No Idea.

Have I ever told you about how that "Sometimes the sun goes 'round the moon," song is like... the soundtrack to my nightmares?  I'm not sure if it's because it was always playing on VH1 when I was a kid, or if the melody and use of celestial bodies to explain something that doesn't even MAKE SENSE are just kind of creepy to me... but that song and Vanessa Williams make my skin crawl.  They give me flash backs to eighth grade when we moved to Mississippi for a year and I didn't realize it was wrong to have a black boyfriend and everybody talked about me and I was so cripplingly insecure that I once bawled until I was sick when I had to go to school on a day where I'd run out of hairspray.

People like Vanessa Williams "writing" books is the stuff of eye-rolls.

All that being said, it wasn't all that terrible to read.

Vanessa and her mother jumped right in to the NAKED PHOTO scandal that rocked Vanessa's reign as Miss America.  (Can you believe that I had no idea that Vanessa Williams had been Miss America, or that there was a naked photo scandal?)  They also reveal some pretty heavy stuff about their childhoods, respectively, involving abuse and neglect.  Of course, they do this all in a totally hairsprayed, one night I slept over at a friends house and got molested and the next day I was back on stage at my Jr. High School, kind of way.

I applaud both of them for the things they were willing to reveal, but don't mistake this book as a gritty, honest account of what it is like to get through trials.  The whole book was this way... kind of like the version you'd tell of your life's horrors and triumphs in an interview with Ryan Seacrest.  It was interesting; kind of like a day time talk show.  It was fast paced and good humored.  Vanessa and Helen Williams did their best to tell the truth, and they were even kind of likeable... which is a real compliment coming from somebody like me.

But, You Have No Idea, was in no way a piece of literature.

Are you interested in hearing more about the book?  Why don't you head over to BlogHer's Book Club to find out what the other book bloggers thought?



I was paid for my opinion, no duh, and everything I expressed here is honest and true.


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