Roseanne Barr

"Roseannearchy is my attempt to weave my own revolutionary code into the mind of the reader."

Roseanne is my hero: a fat crazy Jewish mystic radical socialist feminist self-proclaimed fierce working-class domestic goddess. I was in the middle of reading this book when Roseanne came out in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement, dressed New Left guerilla-chic, proposing that everyone in a higher income bracket face the guillotine or put in a reeducation camp. This is when I fell in love!

I show more finished this book and now I'm wading through the 9 seasons of her groundbreaking television show. I watched it as a child, but never got the full weight of how profoundly working class and feminist it was. Roseanne is a longtime radical, having cut her standup teeth while also working at a radical feminist collective bookstore called Woman to Woman.

It was the story of Woman to Woman, where Roseanne became deeply embedded in a bulwark of feminist struggle for justice that I thought was most intriguing about the book. At the peak of that particular wave of radical feminism in the 80s, Roseanne offers a glimpse of the Reagan counterrevolution that I hadn't previously understood. The manufactured scarcity of social program resources caused local services to become overwhelmed and then shut down. Fractious infighting blossomed as people fought for the scraps left over and the people who relied on social services could no longer support revolutionary projects with as much fervor.

Roseanne seems to have consistently landed on the side of justice, favoring an interracial and revolutionary socialist feminism. Others spun off into priveleged new age paganism, single-issue identity neocolonialism (e.g. queer bookstores with no books about feminism or revolution), and refusing to acknowlege racial injustice within the movement. But Roseanne kept it as real as she could in a failing collective as the waves of counterrevolution spread from top to bottom. Sometimes Roseanne is stupid: though she engages with the white supremacy inherited from the culture at large, and comes around to admitting it, she takes a couple of transphobic pot shot jokes with no such self-criticism. But she is definitely real, and in these pages, she seems like a comrade who is familiar with struggle.

The book is a little over 10 hours long. The section on Women to Women books, made up about 25 minutes, or about 5% of the book. In my opinion, it was so good that it carries the rest of the book, and makes up about 80% of my recollection. There is certainly a lot more in there, especially about Judaism ("All of the holidays were about who killed our people, when and where, and what kind of food goes with each of those massacres."), grandmotherly love, personal spirituality, and politics ("Democracy is based on female freedom. Silencing old loudmouth pushy women is the first thing a smart despot tries to do.").

Lucky for us, Roseanne is coming back into public life, writing, appearing on TV, even perhaps running for president (???). I'm so excited. At the height of her popularity, Roseanne used her pulpit of a primetime show to do amazing things, showing the only honest working class family on television, for one. And from this perspective, Roseanne is incredulous that others don't do similarly envelope-pushing things. She can't stand Oprah's milquetoast bookclub: "Hey Oprah, tell your fans to read Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Talk about a good, relevant read. Oprah has never done one show on economics or capitalism, and that pisses me off. Not one show on how television advertising (which made Oprah a billionaire) makes money by keeping people in front of their TV sets while the guys at the top rob 'em blind! Are we supposed to ignore the elephant in the room? That yes, we need more socialism and less banksterism here in America?"

2020 EDIT: LOL WTF happened to Roseanne? QAnon pushing boomer-ass xenophobe piece of shit. I'll just pretend she died in 2015. show less

This was an interesting book and not one easy to define. Roseanne is angry, and even though justified, she uses aggressive language to describe her emotional chaos over the years. Even though she says she is at peace on her nut farm, it doesn't come through in the book. Good reading for those who want to understand her behaviors over the years, including her rendition of the National Anthem when she made a mess of it when singing it..With her sharp wit and brilliant way of phrasing thoughts, show more she discusses the humor of everyday life with her ideas on more serious topics, including feminism, the cult of celebrity and class warfare. As most of us do, Roseanne hates hypocrisy and is able, with this writing, to expound on it and show it for what it is. Roseanne may be controversial but she is a voice to be reckoned with and the reader will smile and even laugh at times as she uses her talent to flush out those things that bother us all. Look out, reader, as Roseanne unleashes her anger, and enjoy her in a new way. As an author to be reckoned with.. show less

When I started following Roseanne's twitter feed I thought she was a genius, but a little while later I had to unfollow, totally unable to keep up with her nonstop posts about Casey Anthony and random(?) harangues. This book felt kind of the same way, constantly raising and smashing expectations, sometimes sounding like a goddamn prophet and sometimes sounding like email spam.

Read it and weep for Ms Arnold. Her childhood smacks of abuse and her climbing out of the chaos is a story needing to be told. The transition from stand-up stardom, when everyone knew her jokes were hers, to the world of producers and writers who thought nothing of taking credit or her material is revealed in the book, and brings new light to her struggle for personal power. Roseanne tells it like it is, and talks about her personal life, even though her soulmate, Tom Arnold, is no longer in show more her life . If you liked her show, if you like her humor, if you like her...run out and get this book at your library or bookstore. You won't be disappointed. show less