This novel/memoir is hard to rate because the story is so uneven, part 1 reads like Gossip Girl, part 2 is Ice Storm, part 3 is like Friends with more drugs and sex, and 4 is a bit like Eat Pray Love without the poignancy. The narrator comes off as rather spoiled even though she's very honest about her own flaws. A doctor's daughter from Fresno, CA, Taylor has so much going for her and a lot of help in life, money-wise and background-wise, yet she has a lot to complain about anyway. Even though her struggles are not trivial, they don't really resonate with anyone who has ever had to deal with grittier problems.

I liked the book, Taylor's style is funny, dark and full of sharply-drawn characters. Even if her outlook on life won't help anyone else, it was a good read. ( )

The fictional Katherine Taylor (not to be confused with the living, breathing Katherine Taylor) grows up the daughter of an orthopedic surgeon in Fresno. She learns her first lessons about life by eavesdropping on her mother’s phone conversations, and at the age of twelve is shipped off to Boston to attend a prestigious boarding school. The novel quickly unfolds from there as the reader follows Kate into young adulthood, meeting her whacky family and fascinating friends along the way as she moves to New York seeking herself in the bars (as both a writer who bartends, and a patron), and finding her share of unsuitable men.

The Rules for Saying Goodbye is a coming of age novel of sorts, packaged to appeal to women, but certainly not classic chick-lit (I had my husband laughing until tears ran down his face when I read him Chapter 15 of the novel out loud). Taylor writes brilliant dialogue and her characters are sharply observed if not quite a bit dysfunctional. Perhaps the funniest parts of this novel are those centered around Kate’s family. Taylor is skilled at striking a chord to which most people will relate:

'In families, a lot of time can pass without anyone realizing any time has passed. What seems like last Christmas or the Christmas before may have actually been a Christmas from twelve years ago. Hurt feelings and forgettable spats can go on for decades in families.' -From Rules for Saying Goodbye, page 62-

Or following the protagonist’s grandmother’s funeral:

'Afterwards, at lunch in the church reception hall, my father and two priests had to sit between my mother and her feuding siblings. These were feuds that had taken fifty years to develop, based on the sort of animosity that must begin in childhood. An agglomeration of unresolved arguments and slights: the time Uncle Dick slapped my mother back and forth across the face when she had refused to leave a wedding with him forty years ago, the time he bloodied her lip for dating a Japanese boy, the dozens of times Aunt Lou neglected to send invitations to Auntie Petra and Grandma for birthday or Christmas parties, the time Uncle Dick tred to discipline my brother Richard, his namesake, by pinning him against the garage with the car. Also, my mother was still angry with Auntie Petra for feeding her lard when she was eight.' -From Rules for Saying Goodbye, page 129-130-

Rules for Saying Goodbye is funny, heartwarming, and perceptive. Sometimes there are books you hate to see end - this novel turned out to be one of those for me. This was Katherine Taylor’s first novel. I’m looking forward to more from her.

Highly recommended. ( )

Have you ever wondered what “Sex and the City” would be like if Carrie Bradshaw didn’t have her girlfriends, was excruciatingly bad at romantic relationships, and hadn’t ‘made it’ as a writer? If so, you may be interested in “Rules for Saying Goodbye”.

I honestly found the character fairly obnoxious. She was one of those people with whom I find it very difficult to empathize, primarily because she more or less refused to grow up. Towards the end of the book, I began to have the sneaking suspicion that “Rules for Saying Goodbye” is at least partly autobiographical. The first clue to that possibility was that the protagonist main character had the exact same name as the author. More than that, though, was the fact that I wasn’t at all sure why the book was written. It seemed more ‘here is this life,’ without much focus and there was no real conclusion. The character Katherine Taylor is an aspiring writer and, near the end of the book, is near desperate to write a first novel. It seemed that perhaps she may have just decided to write her life and embellish it a bit to make everything seem more glamorous - writing a ‘memoir’ in the same sense that James Frey did, except having enough sense not to call it a memoir.

For the full review:
http://www.devourerofbooks.com/2008/0... ( )

I got through 6 of 8 of the audiobook cds and couldn't care less about any of the characters. Was there an ounce of likability in any of them? People like Taylor's bore me. I also think it was a bad choice to have Taylor herself do the narration. It was a little too smug, a bit wink-wink nudge-nudge. ( )

Publishers Weekly
Katherine Taylor's debut features a narrator named Katherine Taylor, whose rebellious mother sends her from Fresno to Manhattan's fictional Claver prep at age 13. The madcap, fast-forward shenanigans that follow read like Auntie Mame à la A.M. Homes. Rich Claver friend Page gets pregnant and develops a coke habit. Katherine gets a Columbia M.F.A. but lacks drive, tending bar at an exclusive hotspot while trying not to deal with her abrasive mom. Katherine's brother, Ethan, a gay actor, rooms with her in her cheap uptown digs until he becomes "the face of Diet Coke." There's ambivalent romance that involves a move to London. Claver friend Clarissa gets cancer as she turns 30. When a nutty neighbor threatens to kill Katherine, police advise vacating, but "giving up a rent-controlled apartment to save your life is as ridiculous as living in Queens." ( )