Mixed review for this book. Parts I loved when I actually choked laughing, other parts lacked interest. I would recommend it to friends looking for a "quirky" read. ( )

In Susan Gilman’s memoir she writes about her early childhood upbringing by quirky, hippie parents, her rebellious teenage years and continues through adulthood. She writes about the changing relationship that occurs with her parents, as she becomes an adult. The stories are humorous and touching and she doesn’t hesitate to point out how her beliefs sometimes contradict her actions, especially when it comes to feminism. This is a wonderful entertaining book. ( )

Susan Jane Gilman was raised in Upper West Manhattan in the 1970’s, before it became gentrified. Her family was pretty laid back and “groovy” - her grandmother claimed to be a Communist and her mother signed the whole family up for Transcendental Meditation. Throughout it all, Susie retained an active imagination and developed a sense of humor. Her family motto was, “Reality is for people with no imagination.” Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress: Tales of Growing Up Groovy and Clueless by Susan Jane Gilman is her memoir. It starts in her pre-school years and ends when she moved to Geneva shortly after her marriage.

Some of her stories are hilarious - she was tired of her ordinary name, so she convinced her kindergarten teacher that she was changing her name to Sapphire. Her mother signed the whole family up to learn Transcendental Meditation, and her biggest concern was that she might run into a boy she had a crush on who happened to live in the same building as the TM Center. When she wrote an article about gay Rabbis, everyone assumed she was a lesbian and she had to figure out a way to “come out of the closet.”

Parts of the book were touching. Susan was assigned to go to Poland to write an article on the March of the Living - an event where three thousand Jewish teen-agers met in Poland to learn about the Holocaust. Her parents broke up when her brother was in college and she felt her family suffered from a “temporary psychosis that plagued every other divorcing family in America.”

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I laughed out loud quite a few times. After reading this book, I feel like I could sit and talk to Susan Jane Gilman for hours - she’s so interesting and funny! ( )

Susan Gilman is quite the writer. Like other great writers, she was born to write. This book was published in 2005 and how it missed my bookshelf is beyond me. I would compare her to a female David Sedaris. Her book is a compilation of short stories that commence with her early childhood through getting married and moving to Geneva. She has a way of looking at life through such a truthful and witty set of glasses. Like, I am sure, most of her readers, I have picked out my favorite stories of hers in this book. Let me give you a quick “run-down” of this great written work:

Part I – Grape Juice and Humiliation

Part I commences with Susan’s early childhood vacation at Silver Lake in the late 60’s/early 70’s timeframe in which peace, love and VW buses were the “rage.” At Silver Lake, a chubby Gilman finds stardom in her first cameo role in an independent film as a naked “cherub” dancing around a freaky hippie with another naked child. It was one of those movies where the people try to fit like 100 people in the VW bus and climb out one by one to show how many people they can cram into that darned thing. From this story, Gilman takes us to kindergarten with her to enjoy her on-going display of creative lies that she dreams up for “show and tell.” Thereafter, we learn about her life in the streets of New York and growing up in a multi-cultural demographic. She decides, based upon the beautiful communion dresses, that she’d like to be Puerto Rican rather than a white, Jewish girl. There are just fabulous parts of this section where she exposes the white childrens’ desire to be more “ethnic” and use accents and dialects of the other children because being white plainly sucked and had no “umpfh” to it (for lack of better wording). When she is put in a private school, she is then faced with the decision making of becoming a Christian or remaining a “Jew.” She felt that the worst downside of Judaism was having to wait for the Messiah… I mean, why just not have him now! I loved her confident use of the word “Virgin” (pertaining to the Virgin Mary) while not knowing what it meant at all. The first part of the book was, by far, my favorite.

Part II – Not Just Horny, But Obnoxious, Too

We get a back-stage pass to Susan’s growing of age in this section. I could COMPLETELY relate to Susan’s infatuation with rock-stars and famous entertainers of her day. Although, she is a bit older than I and The Stones were just a bit ahead of my time, I enjoyed reading about her “love affair” with Mick Jagger in which he would someday arrive at her high school in his limo, only to emerge from such and pick her up from Geometry class. (hee hee). I had that with Duran Duran and John Taylor (who, by the way… I heard is appearing on an episode of Samantha Who in the next couple of weeks). The funniest part of all is that she actually does meet Mick at a holiday party. He dons her “the girl there with the biggest ta ta’s” (I’m not using the word from the book). This section goes on to take you through her abstinence from sexual intercourse and the completely overactive hormones of typical teenagers. What I liked about this section is that, when she finally loses her virginity, she is more obsessed with calling her best friend to talk about it than actually the act itself. Classic!


Part III – Reality Says “Hello”

The final section of the book takes the readers through her young adulthood into her early marriage. This section is nearly equally as good as the first. Gilman writes beautifully about her parents’ divorce after 26 years of marriage and what it is like to be an adult child of a divorced couple. I loved what her mother ended up doing with her life and turning her situation around. My favorite “laugh out loud” moment was when she makes a bet with her father over what her younger brother would say when her father asked him about piercing his ear at the age of 52… classic! The reader accompanies Gilman through her first paying jobs as a writer, first for a Jewish newspaper and then for a Congresswoman, both are equally funny. Although, in the chapter in which she describes her work at the Jewish publication, she actually goes to Poland for the press on an event which consisted of an event called the “March of the Living,” in which 3,000 Jewish teenagers from around the world came to Poland for a week to learn about Jewish history and the Holocaust. While in Poland, she visited the sites of the concentration camps and the site of the killings in Auschwitz. The way she described these locations made me sick to my stomach… the atrocities of man’s history. When she returns home, she goes through many funny adventures, including her masquerade as a lesbian after writing a column about gay and lesbian rabbis. I loved one of the final sections she wrote about her experience in David’s Bridal when shopping for her wedding dress.

This book had some “laugh out loud” moments and was very well written. I would most definitely recommend this book. It was light, funny, and a walk through memory lane in comparing her history to my own.

Favorite Quotes:

“White dorkiness was glaring and embarrassing. Augh, how we wanted to wriggle away from it! Our black and Hispanic friends seemed all-knowing, almost invincible to us. They were like the superheros of the neighborhood. They were clearly the best at anything that truly mattered to us kids: Loyalty. Cracking Jokes. Thinking Quickly. Musical Taste. Opening Up a Big Fresh Mouth. Playing Stickball and Basketball. Bravery. Resisting Pompous Authority Figures. Jumping Rope. Beating Up People. Telling It like It is. Hairdos.”

“So the girls who poked me at the movies and the older boys who threaten John do so because we’re all human?” (asking her father)… “Of course,” said my father. “Only humans do crazy sh%t like that. The day that a cow or a Chihuahua hits you in the ass with an umbrella or an ice pick, you let me know.”

“Yet, the idea of making Congress comprehensible to ‘ordinary folks’ sent me into a panic. Because what the hell did I know about Congress? The total sum of my knowledge consisted of the two minute jingle ‘I’m Just a Bill’ from Schoolhouse Rock. Why, I could barely distinguish between the House and the Senate, and I’d once – albeit drunkenly – confused a picture of the Capitol with that of the Vatican.”

On Sher’s “Out of Ten” Scale:

This book, I would put in the same genre as a David Sedaris’ book… but, with a female viewpoint. I liked it. I would recommend it for a fun summer-read… or just something to take your mind off of coming out of a heavy read. It’s relatable and enjoyable. I’d give it, within that genre, a 9 out of 10. Thank you, Michelle, for lending me the book. ( )

Found at anovelmenagerie.com